On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously injured outside a Washington hotel by John W. Hinckley Jr. Also wounded were the White House news secretary James Brady, who was left paralyzed by the shooting, a Secret Service agent and a District of Columbia police officer. As The New York Times reported, "A rapid series of five or six shots rang out at about 2:30 p.m. as Mr. Reagan left the hotel. A look of stunned disbelief swept across the president's face when the shots were fired just after he raised his left arm to wave to the crowd. Reagan did not immediately realize that he had been shot. He was rushed to the hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery to remove the bullet and to repair his lung. The president remained in good humor: he reportedly told his wife Nancy, "Honey, I forgot to duck" (a line first attributed to the boxing heavyweight Jack Dempsey when he lost the title to Gene Tunney in 1926), and his doctors, "Please tell me you're Republicans." The Times reported that Reagan spent about three hours in the operating room and that his doctor said he "was never in any serious danger." The shooting was captured on camera. "Within minutes," The Times continued, "Americans were witnessing for the second time in a generation television pictures of a chief executive being struck by gunfire during what appeared to be a routine public appearance. For the second time in less than 20 years, too, they watched as the nation's leaders scrambled to meet one of the sternest tests of the democratic system. During the president's incapacitation, Secretary of State Alexander Haig declared, "I am in control here," which many interpreted as an attempt to assume the presidency despite the fact that the secretary of state is fourth in the line of succession behind the vice president (George H.W. Bush, who was in Texas at the time of the assassination and unable to assume control as acting president), speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate. No official transfer of power occurred. Reagan recovered from his injuries and managed to give an address before Congress a month after the shooting. The oldest man ever to be elected president, Reagan had faced concerns about his vitality during his campaign; his resilience and quick recovery from the shooting quieted these concerns and caused his approval numbers to soar. Mr. Hinckley was a mentally unstable 25 year old with an obsession with the actress Jodie Foster. He claimed to have been inspired by "Taxi Driver," a film starring Ms. Foster in which a character attempts to kill a politician to earn the admiration of a campaign worker. Mr. Hinckley believed that shooting the president would impress Ms. Foster, writing her a letter a night before the assassination attempt saying, "I am doing all of this for your sake." Connect to Today: Mr. Hinckley was charged with 13 criminal counts related to the shooting, but he was found not guilty by insanity on all counts. The national outrage over the decision prompted the passage of a law, the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which made it more difficult to be acquitted of crimes based on mental health. In a 2006 article for The Times, Morris B. Hoffman and Stephen J. Morse argued that legal insanity tests were too narrow in some states. "Punishing the deserving wrongdoers among us - those who intentionally violate the criminal law and are cognitively unimpaired - takes people seriously as moral agents and lies at the heart of what being civilized is all about," they wrote. But being civilized also means not punishing those whom we deem morally impaired by mental disorder. Convicting and punishing a defendant who genuinely believed that God commanded him to kill is not unscientific, it is immoral and unjust. The issue of legal insanity was also debated in a January 2011 edition of The Times's Room for Debate after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords by Jared Lee Loughner, a mentally disturbed man. Arizona, where the shooting took place, does not allow for "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdicts, though it does issue "guilty but insane" verdicts. In your opinion, how should the U.S. justice system approach mental illness? Should it err on the side of convicting or acquitting those diagnosed as mentally ill? Learn more about what happened in history on March 30