Presidential Assassination By The Numbers

Digging through the data around assassination attempts

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

I recently did a deep dive into all of the presidential assassination attempts that have happened in United States history. While doing my research I started stumbling upon trends, patterns, and numbers that instantly took me by surprise. Here is what I found out.

*Note: All of these numbers are based on 13 attempts.

Way more common than expected

There have been four presidents who have been assassinated in United States history. The most recent occurred in 1963 with the death of John F Kennedy. While that assassination occurred over fifty years ago, the success rate was much higher than I anticipated.

Four deaths out of forty-five presidents give us an assassination rate of 8.8%.

That is a lot.

The inverse gives us a 91.2% survival rate for US presidents which is just low enough to make one pause.

I identified thirteen legitimate attempts on the lives of US presidents. There are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of failed plots, abandoned ideas, and what-ifs and almosts that one could dredge up if they wanted to. But there were thirteen attempts which all could have been successful or…