RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
And I'm Steve Inskeep.
INSKEEP: We don't know the shooter's motive but...
MONTAGNE: After the "but," people have speculated about everything from insanity to the tone of politics. This morning, to be clear, we still don't know the motive of Jared Loughner. He's accused of killing six people at a congresswoman's public meeting.
INSKEEP: NPR's Alix Spiegel found a detailed study of past assassins and would-be assassins. It offers insight into what makes a person pull the trigger.
ALIX SPIEGEL: It's well-known that in March of 1981, John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. What's not well-known is that several years later, the life of the president - and the life of the vice president - were threatened again - in fact, not just once.
D: In the space of 18 months, four situations came to the attention of the Secret Service.
SPIEGEL: This is Robert Fein, who in the mid-'80s was working with the Secret Service as a psychologist. In two of these incidents, he says, people with weapons and an intent to kill appeared at public events. In two, they were intercepted before the events. Now, all four of these cases were ultimately prosecuted, though the government didn't exactly advertise it.
D: These were not stories that hit the news, but they were situations that caused great concern for protectors. So after these incidents, the Secret Service leadership got together and said, we really would like to know more about the behaviors of these people.
SPIEGEL: And so Fein and a Secret Service agent named Brian Vossekuil undertook the most extensive study of assassins and would-be assassins ever done. They identified 83 people who had completed assassinations, or made assassination attempts, since 1949 - some cases were known to the public, some not - and collected every document they could find. But also, Fein and Vossekuil went to visit many of these people in jail - went with a very particular pitch.
D: We're here because we're in the business of trying to protect people and prevent these kinds of attacks. You are one of the few experts because you've engaged in this behavior. We would like to talk with you to understand your perspectives, your life. And many people said: I would be very glad to talk with you.
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D: How did you feel about Vice President Bush at the time, as a person?
U: Bush was the vice president, running for president. He was a very important person, a very famous person.
SPIEGEL: In 1999, they published the results in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. And the insights of this study are really interesting to look at in light of the Arizona shooting. Perhaps the most interesting finding - at least, to me - is that according to Fein and Vossekuil, assassinations of political figures were almost never for political reasons.
D: It was very, very rare for the primary motive to be political, though there were a number of attackers who appeared to clothe their motives with some political rhetoric.
SPIEGEL: What emerges from the study is that rather than being politically motivated, most of the assassins and would-be assassins simply felt invisible. In the year before their attacks, most struggled with acute reversals and disappointment in their lives - which, the paper argues, often led to their true motive: They didn't want to be nonentities.
D: They experienced failure after failure after failure, and decided rather than being a nobody, they wanted to be a somebody.
SPIEGEL: Randy Borum is a professor at the University of South Florida, who worked on this study.
INSKEEP: If the objective is notoriety or fame, that's the most efficient instrumental mechanism by which to achieve that. I don't mean to be flip about that, but a public official is likely to bring them a substantial amount of recognition instantly, without having to achieve something.
SPIEGEL: In the interview tapes of the man who attempted to assassinate George H.W. Bush, you hear very clearly this longing for fame.
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U: Being on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
SPIEGEL: And one thing Borum and Fein say about choosing a political figure - as opposed to, for example, a show business celebrity - is that the attacker is able to associate himself with a broader political movement or goal, which allows the assassin not to see himself as such a bad person. In this way, Borum says, assassins are basically murderers in search of a cause.
INSKEEP: People make decisions to act, and then from that construct for themselves - and potentially, for others - a narrative about why that is OK, or how this could be justified. It's sort of a reverse pattern from what we would typically think.
SPIEGEL: You can see this very clearly, Borum says, from the way many of the assassins in the study chose their targets. Though occasionally they'd fixate on a single person who represented a clear political position, many just went from target to target to target.
INSKEEP: About half of the assassins in this study had multiple targets - or what sometimes is referred to as directions of interest - throughout the course of deliberating about an attack.
SPIEGEL: For example, there was one guy who was fixated on his governor until he heard the vice president was coming to his area.
INSKEEP: He said he had read enough to know that there hadn't been anybody who had attempted to assassinate a sitting vice president of the United States.
SPIEGEL: So he made the vice president his target. He told the researchers that he thought this would get him more attention from historians.
INSKEEP: In the books on assassination, there might even be a whole chapter on him.
SPIEGEL: Now, the other assumption that people make about assassins is that they're insane, people completely divorced from reality. But this study, to a degree, rejects that idea as too simplistic. Yes, the authors write, many of the people were experiencing, or had experienced, serious mental health issues. Forty-four percent had a history of depression; 43, a history of delusional ideas. But as Robert Fein points out, the way these people sought to address what they saw as their main problems - anonymity and failure - wasn't inherently crazy.
MONTAGNE: There's nothing crazy about thinking that if I attacked the president or a major public official, I'd get a lot of attention. I would get a lot of attention. My goal was notoriety. That's why I brought the weapon.
SPIEGEL: And, Fein says, most of the assassins and would-be assassins weren't totally disorganized by mental illness, either.
MONTAGNE: They were quite organized, because one has to be organized - to at least, some extent - to attack a public official.
SPIEGEL: Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.
INSKEEP: Gabrielle Giffords' health continues to improve after opening her eyes on Wednesday.
MONTAGNE: On Thursday, she sat up with assistance, and began moving her arms and legs. Her husband, NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, is at her side.
INSKEEP: And at his request, NASA has selected a backup in case he's not able to join a space mission he's slated to command in April.