Sara Jane Moore Attempted to Assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, She Discusses her Actions in Television Interview

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The last thing anyone would ever suspect 80 year old Sara Jane Moore of trying to assassinate a president of the United States. This affable grandmotherly woman spent 32 years in prison for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. On September 22, 1975 in San Francisco, she fired a shot at the president that missed his head by several feet. She was wrestled to the ground by a bystander before she was taken into custody by the authorities. Besides the fact that she attempted to commit a horrible crime, it is important to look at her motivation and circle of friends that led her to that moment. She was a 45-year-old divorced mother who hung around disaffected groups feeding her alienation. I remember a cardinal lesson I learnt at an early age from my mother -- people know you by the company you keep. That has stuck with me throughout my entire life.

Looking back on the incident, she says of her earlier self that it seems like a "different person." She sees the genesis of her assassination attempt as stemming from her immersion in radical leftist groups that were pushing her to the edge, and that she was alienated from the world as it was and needed to do something about it. It's unclear why she felt killing President Ford would have done anything about it, but she declares that to this day she believes if she hadn't made the attempt someone else would have:

Oh, I still think that. If I hadn't done it, someone else would have. That was the tenor of the time. There was more talk about it than people realize. Again, I thought that what was happening to us there in San Francisco was the whole world and it wasn't. I had to learn later that everybody didn't feel that way.
Some six of her 32 two years spent behind bars was in solitary confinement. She escaped from prison in 1979 but was promptly recaptured. In hindsight Moore believes that the action was wrong, although "understandably wrong, but that's just my ego talking." Source: Huffington Post

It's amazing how strong peer pressure is and just being in the wrong frame of mind and surrounding yourself with people who feed off that. I must say that personal responsibility plays a big role in one's actions. She knew quite clearly that she was attempting to assassinate the president of the United States and did it anyway. I hope she has come to terms with her actions and she has paid her dues to society. I hope she will live out the sunset years of her life in peace and find the happiness that eluded her 32 years ago that led her down a very dark and lonely road.