Would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. — who has been trying to reinvent himself as a traveling musician four decades after shooting Ronald Reagan — has a concert scheduled for Albany next year after repeated gig cancellations.
“Big news! I will be doing a show in Albany, NY in January! More details to come,” the ex-con tweeted Saturday.
Exactly where the 67-year-old guitar-playing, tune-writing former wannabe assassin will perform is not clear.
Hinckley has been trying to land before an audience since being unconditionally freed from prison custody in June over the 1981 shooting, which was part of a bizarre scheme by him to impress actress Jodie Foster.
Would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. has an upcoming concert in Albany.
US Marshals escort John Hinckley Jr. as he returns to a Marine base via helicopter in Quantico, Va., Aug. 8, 1981. AP Photo/Barry Thumma, FileHinckley had a mid-June performance planned for the Market Hotel in Brooklyn, but it was scrapped after online pushback.
“There was a time when a place could host a thing like this, maybe a little offensive, and the reaction would be ‘it’s just a guy playing a show, who does it hurt – it’s a free country,’ ” the venue said at the time. “We aren’t living in that kind of free country anymore, for better or for worse.”
Hinckley has spent the bulk of the past four decades at a mental hospital in Washington, DC, after he was found guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 for shooting Reagan with a .22 pistol outside a Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981. Reagan nearly died but eventually recovered from his wound.
His press secretary, James Brady, was also hit along with two other people. Brady was the most seriously wounded and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He went on to become a noted spokesman for gun control, with lawmakers naming in his honor the 1994 federal Brady Bill law mandating background checks and a five-day waiting period for gun purchases.
Hinckley, who was 25 at the time of the shooting, notoriously took aim at Reagan after watching the 1976 movie “Taxi Driver” about a deranged gunman who attempts to assassinate a politician amid an effort to liberate an underage prostitute portrayed by Foster, who was 19 at the time of the Reagan shooting.
News of his latest upcoming concert was first reported by the Albany Times Union.
“Big news! I will be doing a show in Albany, NY in January! More details to come,” John Hinckley Jr. tweeted Saturday. TwitterWhile Hinckley and his supporters say he is a changed man after decades under court supervision, some Reagan family members say they can hardly forget, much less forgive, what he did to their famous dad and others.
“There is no manual for how to deal with something like this. You can’t Google it or look for reference material. You just have to live with the fear, and the anger, and the darkness that one person keeps bringing into your life,” Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis wrote in a 2021 op-ed in the Washington Post.







