“Well I don’t know what is wrong with this world,

I wanna see some love.

Everybody’s fightin’, here and there,

I wanna see some love.

Can’t we get along?

All day long,

Think it's time we do.”

This is the message of unity we’re hearing across the nation now, after a shocking weekend of violence at a Trump rally.

But the author of these words may surprise you.

It’s from a song written by John W. Hinckley Jr., the man who shot President Ronald Reagan 43 years ago in D.C.

And his actions and words show us the problem isn’t about politics. It’s guns.

Leaders across the nation are decrying the shooting of former president Donald Trump at a weekend rally as “political violence.”

“Violence has no place in our politics,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, (R-Ky.), said on X.

“Political violence has no place in our country,” said Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a statement.

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The politics aren’t the story here, as they weren’t when Hinckley pulled the trigger.

He’s important to remember — and listen to — at this moment, as the nation grasps for a motive in the shooting that killed one of the rallygoers and injured former president Donald Trump.

We’re riveted, searching for anything about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old killed by the Secret Service moments after they said he fired six rounds into the crowd at Trump’s Saturday rally in Pennsylvania, grazing Trump, injuring another person and killing a firefighter there with his family.

He’s a registered Republican!

Wait, he donated $15 to a liberal PAC!

What? He had no criminal record? What are his politics?

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Where’s the manifesto?

In 1981, when Hinckley shot Reagan, his press secretary Jim Brady and two members of the presidential detail, we weren’t so used to this now-familiar pattern of figuring out a shooter.

“Prosecutors did not suggest a motive for the shootings,” the Associated Press wrote on the day Hinckley was arraigned in D.C.

Hinckley wasn’t rabidly anti-Reagan, this wasn’t about GOP politics.

The previous year, he was arrested with three guns in his suitcase in Nashville and investigators believe he was following former president Jimmy Carter.

Turns out his motive had nothing to do with Reaganomics, the Second Amendment or the GOP. Hinckley was obsessed with actress Jodie Foster and wanted to impress her by mimicking a character in one of her films, “Taxi Driver.”

How could a nation make sense of that?

It was Vernon Jordan who pinpointed the problem right away — guns.

Jordan, who was then the president of the National Urban League, had been shot in the back the year before Hinckley’s shooting.

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He knew it was time to call out America’s gun problem.

“This is a good opportunity to do it,” he said in a news conference three days after the shooting. “The country is outraged at the shooting of the president and what’s happening on the streets of America.”

He worried America wouldn’t move to control the Saturday night special, the cheap handguns like the .22 revolver Hinckley bought for $47 from Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas and fired in D.C. These were the main drivers of American gun violence at the time.

A lot of American households — around 53 percent at the time — had guns, according to an analysis by the Violence Policy Center.

But we didn’t have such a powerful, political gun culture.

“The climate of the country right now is not good,” Hinckley told ABC News soon after his release from court oversight in 2022. “It’s not good to have so many guns.”

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Will this weekend’s shooting motivate a surge of support for common sense gun laws? Probably not.

Brady made his entire second act about gun control until his death in 2014, which was ultimately ruled a slow-motion homicide because it was the lasting result of Hinckley’s bullets impacting his body.

His organization, which uses his last name Brady, reminded us of the factors that were similar in 1981 and at Trump’s rally — guns.

“Political violence has no place in this country,” said Kris Brown, president of Brady’s organization.

“But we must also recognize that this horrific event mirrors the senseless gun violence plaguing our communities every day. Our response can’t stop at condemning political violence alone,” Brown said.

“We must acknowledge that easy access to firearms enables both political and everyday violence,” she continued. “To truly address this weekend’s political violence, we need to consider comprehensive gun reform that tackles the root cause: the proliferation of firearms in our society.”

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