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Forty-five years after John Hinckley Jr. opened fire outside the Washington Hilton, wounding President Ronald Reagan and others, Americans are being asked to treat his second act as simply another celebrity memoir. On March 30, 1981, Hinckley’s bullets changed lives and produced a courtroom drama that ended with a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity in June 1982 — a decision that reshaped debates about justice and public safety.
Now Hinckley is peddling a new book called Who I Really Am and doing interviews to rehabilitate his image, and the mainstream has been all too willing to oblige. Local reporting shows him out of institutional supervision and speaking candidly about his past as he tours and markets his memoir, the sort of media tour that would have been unthinkable to many Americans just a few years ago.
Hinckley has tried to explain his motive away as a clinical delusion — an erotomanic obsession with actress Jodie Foster that he says drove him to mimic the violence of Taxi Driver and to seek Foster out at Yale. He admits to letters, phone calls, poems and a twisted conviction that murderous spectacle would win affection; hearing him talk it through should chill every parent and patriot who remembers the terror of that spring day.
The public response was predictably mixed, with veterans, victims’ families and the Reagan Foundation rightly objecting to the idea that the man who seriously wounded a president should be given the kind of soft landing and publicity now on offer. Courts lifted the last of Hinckley’s restrictions in June 2022, and when he tried to turn that freedom into a career — booking concerts and interviews — venues and watchdogs pushed back. That backlash is not merely about punishment; it’s about decency and the memory owed to those who suffered.
Conservatives should be clear-eyed here: the insanity defense and the subsequent handling of Hinckley’s case exposed real weaknesses in how our system balances mental health treatment and accountability. The 1982 verdict and the decades of supervision that followed were historic detours that still leave many unanswered questions about victim rights and public safety — questions journalists and judges cannot be allowed to paper over with puff pieces.
Worse, parts of the media and certain true crime circles are treating Hinckley like a figure to be analyzed and humanized rather than someone whose actions left a permanent scar on our national life. Podcasters and local outlets have given him a platform to narrate his reinvention, and the result is a cultural environment that rewards notoriety while sidelining the families of the wounded. That is a choice — and conservatives ought to call it what it is: celebrity rehabilitation masquerading as journalism.
We owe Reagan, Jim Brady and every American a firmer standard. Sympathy belongs to victims, not to the architects of violence seeking to monetize their infamy. If our media and our courts are going to talk about mercy and recovery, they must also remember responsibility, consequence, and the duty to protect the public and honor those who paid the price. Let that be the principle that guides how we judge these second acts.
