This Just In – In the evening on this day in 1980, a deranged fan of John Lennon’s walked up to him in front of his apartment building and shot him in the back, killing him.
The next morning, I heard the first news mention of Lennon’s death and my mind went straight to drug overdose as the cause. Like the shocking deaths of Joplin, Morrison, Hendrix and so many others, I easily imagined this for John Lennon. The next words of his being the victim of a murder – at the hands of a fame-seeking fan – were jarring and sickening in a completely different way.
His killer (whose name I will not use here) waited for police to arrive after the shooting. He wanted to have his name forever associated with Lennon’s.
That day, I took my lunch break and went to McDonald’s on Durham-Chapel Hill Boulevard. I sat in my car, facing the street, watching the cars pass on a chilly grey day, rain spitting tears on my windshield from time to time. On the radio – all Lennon, all the time.
This, in my opinion, should happen annually on December 8. No need to explain, only to listen.
Within a four-month period, both John Lennon and Ronald Reagan were both shot with handguns, which were the most threatening gun control problem at that time because of the ability of shooters to access them easily and conceal them until just before firing. Even so, Reagan could not get a gun control bill passed during his two-term presidency.
Named for Reagan’s Press Secretary James Brady, who took a bullet to his brain during the assassination attempt on the president, the Brady Bill was finally passed into law during the Clinton administration.
Handguns are still a major problem in the United States. More than 45,000 people die each year in the United States in gun-related deaths. More than half of those are suicides.
More than half. Imagine that. All those families. All those survivors. The pain of it. Year after year.
High profile murders are terrible, awful things. In the case of John Lennon, we lost an artist at a point in his life when he was doing amazing work. He had just released his Double Fantasy album. He’d settled into mid-life as a grown-up. Oh, what might have been.
When I think of gun violence, though, I think of a friend who worked with my husband for many years. She loaned me maternity clothes when I was pregnant the second time. Beautiful dresses. Perfect flowing tops. After I returned them, she shared them with other expectant mommies in Rick’s department at Blue Cross.
After Rick left the organization, we saw each other far less. In October of 2008, she and her husband had split up and she was dating a new guy. When she broke it off, he came back to her house and killed her, then himself. With “only” two fatalities, this wouldn’t count as a mass shooting. For us, it just counts as a horrific ending to the life of a hardworking, decent person who wanted to watch her children grow up and become a grandmother one day.
Gun violence is always personal. It’s always devastating. It’s so very, very often avoidable. Imagine if we could prevent that. Just imagine.
In 2000, New York State prison officials denied Lennon’s killer parole, telling him that his “vicious and violent act was apparently fueled by your need to be acknowledged.” He remains behind bars, having been denied parole a dozen times since 2000.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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