Tim McCarthy, the Secret Service agent who took a bullet for Reagan, spoke with ABC7 Saturday night.
The apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump hits close to home for McCarthy.
"This is an attempted assassination of the former president, so this is a very, very serious matter," McCarthy said.
The former Orland Park, Illinois, police chief spent eight years assigned to the Presidential Protective Division in Washington, D.C. In 1981, he was shot in the line of duty while protecting President Ronald Reagan during an assassination attempt.
"It gets pretty tough out there in the campaign trail, but this cannot happen in our country," McCarthy said.
Here is a timeline of the United States' most high-profile shootings involving political and public figures over the last 75 years.
- 1950: President Harry Truman was inside the Blair House in Washington, D.C. when Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola tried to assassinate him. Truman was not injured, but a law enforcement officer was killed.
- 1963: President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for murder before being shot and killed just two days later.
- 1968: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed at a motel in Memphis by James Earl Ray.
- 1968: Robert F. Kennedy was killed by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign.
- 1972: George Wallace was shot in Maryland while running for president. Arthur Bremer was later convicted of attempted murder.
- 1975: President Gerald Ford survived two attempted assassinations, both of which took place in California.
- 1978: San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were killed at City Hall by Dan White, a former San Francisco supervisor.
- 1980: Russell Lloyd, Sr., the mayor of Evansville, Indiana, was shot and killed by Julie Van Orden.
- 1981: President Ronald Reagan survived a shooting by John Hinckley, Jr. outside a Washington, D.C. hotel.
- 1998: Two police officers were shot and killed when Russell E. Weston Jr. opened fire on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
- 2003: New York City Councilman James Davis was shot and killed by Othniel Askew at City Hall in Lower Manhattan.
- 2008: Several municipal officials, including two law enforcement officers, were killed when Charles Lee Thornton opened fire at a local government meeting in Kirkwood, Missouri.
- 2011: A mass shooting at an Arizona event hosted by Rep. Gabby Giffords killed six people. Giffords survived and Jared Loughner was arrested.
- 2017: Rep. Steve Scalise survived a shooting by James Hodgkinson at a congressional baseball event in Virginia. Hodgkinson was shot by law enforcement at the scene and died.
- 2022: A gunman opened fire at the campaign headquarters of Louisville mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg. No one was killed. Quintez Brown was arrested and is awaiting trial in Kentucky.