Assassination attempt on US President Gerald Ford is Foiled

Sara Jane Moore’s Attempt to Assassinate

Assassination attempt on US President Gerald Ford is Foiled

Sara Jane Moore (née Kahn; born February 15, 1930) is an American who attempted to assassinate US President Gerald Ford in 1975. She was given a life sentence for the attempted assassination and was released from prison on December 31, 2007, after serving 32 years. Moore and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme are the only two women to have attempted to assassinate an American president; both of their attempts were on Gerald Ford and both took place in California within three weeks of one another.

Moore had been evaluated by the Secret Service earlier in 1975, but agents decided that she posed no danger to the president. She had been picked up by police on an illegal handgun charge the day before the Ford incident, but was released. The police confiscated her .44 caliber revolver and 113 rounds of ammunition.

Moore's assassination attempt took place in San Francisco on September 22, 1975, just 17 days after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme's attempted assassination of Ford. She was standing in the crowd across the street from the St. Francis Hotel, and was about 40 feet (12 m) away from Ford[11] when she fired a single shot at him with a .38 caliber revolver. She was using a gun she bought in haste that same morning and did not know the sights were six inches off the point-of-impact at that distance, and she narrowly missed.

After realizing she had missed, she raised her arm again, and Oliver Sipple, a former Marine, dived towards her and grabbed her arm, possibly saving Ford's life. Sipple said at the time: "I saw [her gun] pointed out there and I grabbed for it. I lunged and grabbed the woman's arm and the gun went off." The bullet from the second shot ricocheted and hit John Ludwig, a 42-year-old taxi driver. Ludwig survived.[16] U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti, still on the bench in 2010, spoke on the record, saying that Moore would have killed Ford had she had her own gun, and it was only "because her gun was faulty" that the president's life was spared.

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