On the night of April 25, 2026, a man checked into a Washington hotel with a shotgun, a handgun, and a knife, and a thousand-word document listing administration officials in order of priority. He never reached the ballroom. The President was unharmed. The pattern continues.

Everyone has strong feelings about political assassination. Almost nobody has enough history to fully understand it.

Here is what the historical record actually shows: assassination almost never works. The assassins who have killed leaders throughout history — from Julius Caesar to Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy — have almost uniformly failed to produce the outcome they intended. They killed someone. The system absorbed the death. A successor emerged. The cause they opposed survived, often strengthened by the act committed against it.

The martyrdom effect is real. The assassin's psychological profile is remarkably consistent across centuries. The American pattern of presidential assassination is rarer than people assume — but the attempts, the near-misses, and the accelerating frequency of threats tell a story that the successful assassinations alone do not.

In Political Assassination: Seven Things You Should Know, the latest volume in the I'm No Expert, But series, writer Jim Stovall cuts through the emotion of the current moment to examine what history actually tells us — about who commits assassination and why, about when it has genuinely changed history and when it has not, about how the security apparatus evolved in response to failure, and about what the current moment of American political violence looks like when placed against the long historical record.

Readable in about forty minutes. Accurate to the last detail. Written for a moment when understanding matters more than outrage.

Curious, a little lost, and taking notes.