Nor did presidential security tighten up to anything even resembling today’s levels until after Hinckley shot Reagan. She was interviewed, they kept her gun and released her. If they had tried to lock up every raving bugnutty in the San Francisco area in the mid-70’s they’d have had to confine half the city.

n fact, San Francisco police had dealt with Moore in the past, and viewed her as a potential threat to the president.

Two days before the attempted assassination, they arrested her on the street with a .44-caliber revolver in her handbag and boxes of ammunition in her car.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-ford1jan01,1,2916191,full.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

Police alerted the Secret Service, who interviewed her and released her. Less than 48 hours later, she purchased her .38 from a friend, stationed herself outside the St. Francis in a crowd of several thousand and tried to shoot her way into history.

She shouldn’t have been released. After this, why didn’t anybody notice her in the crowd?

Squeaky Fromme is a different story, but she’s not eligible for mandatory parole under the 30 year rule. She’s been in trouble pretty much full-time since going to prison.

http://www.mercurynews.com/alamedacounty/ci_7855629

 Under federal parole rules for inmates serving life terms, Moore was eligible for parole 10 years after she was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti, now 85 and still hearing cases in the San Francisco federal building. Conti could not be reached for comment Monday.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/01/MN2UU7JA4.DTL

Moore was released under a federal law that makes parole mandatory for inmates who have served at least 30 years of a life sentence without getting into trouble, according to Thomas Hutchison, chief of staff of the U.S. Parole Commission.

Fromme, now 59, is serving a life sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas. Hutchison said he had no knowledge of any parole hearing for Fromme.

Under legislation enacted more than two decades ago, federal prisoners who committed offenses after Oct. 31, 1987, are no longer paroled. That was more than 12 years after Moore secured a spot in California’s Rogues’ Gallery with her attempt to kill Ford.

Certainly all ideologies are not equal in their concentration of people willing to kill. I think that it’s clear that Islam is far more likely to produce homicidal maniacs than Christianity, at least in their current incarnations. Somehow though, the left and right sides of US politics don’t seem to have any such distinction.

What has occurred to me reading this is the likelihood that Moore got out early in part because of being a woman. I have a hunch that had the name of the would be assassin been Jason, and not Jane Moore, the liberation might not have happened. My feeling is that juries and judges are more likely to assume that a female killer is simply deranged, while a male killer is evil.