Yoko Ono posts this image of Lennons actual glasses, which she took the day after he was murdered. This is the 2016 edition. The number will have gone up when she posts it again today.
Yoko Ono posts this image of Lennon's actual glasses, which she took the day after he was murdered. This is the 2016 edition. The number will have gone up when she posts it again today.

Thirty-seven years ago today, Mark David Chapman fired four bullets into John Lennon’s chest using a .38-caliber Charter Arms pistol which he had purchased legally for $169.

Lennon died early the following morning.

It’s a powerfully sad anniversary for a million reasons that still feel personal to millions of people and I will always be one of them. It’s also a horrible reminder that the ease of access to handguns in America is inversely proportional to mental health care access, and both are an international disgrace.

And speaking of international disgraces:

In another country, the murder of someone like Lennon—a deeply flawed man whose music helped elevate the human consciousness—would have occasioned a reckoning about guns and mental health that we’d still be talking about today. Instead, we got Ronald Reagan, who was inaugurated six weeks after Lennon’s death, and soon began gutting federal funds for mental health just as he had in California.

And despite the fact that he, too, would be shot only two months after taking office, Reagan was loyal to the NRA throughout his two terms as president. After he left office, he backed admittedly significant gun control measures—the Brady Bill (named after the aide shot in the head during the attempt on Reagan’s life) in 1993, and the assault weapons ban of 1994.

It will always be unclear whether the dementia that bedeviled the latter years of his administration had developed into Alzheimer’s Disease, and to what extent his wife Nancy Reagan was dictating his actions by this stage. Speaking of mental health.

In any event, Ronald Reagan lived to be 93.

John Lennon barely made it to 40.

2013
2013

2014
2014

2015
2015