On the afternoon of March 30, 1981, Sarah Brady had just returned home from picking up her 2 year-old son, Scott, from a play date. Her husband, White House Press Secretary James Brady, was not yet home.
“I turned on the television,” she said. “There was a soap opera on, and I was half watching it. They came on and said that shots had been fired at the president, but I thought Jim wouldn’t be with the president. I didn’t think anything about it.”
Then the phone rang. “It was my good friend who said she was going to come over and take care of Scott. I didn’t know what she meant. She watched ABC soaps, and I watched CBS. On ABC, they had pictures already. She had seen the picture of Jim.”
Jim Brady had been shot by John Hinckley, a disturbed young man who was trying to kill President Ronald Reagan. Also wounded by the six shots he fired were Reagan, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy and D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty.
The famous video from that day shows Brady lying face down on the sidewalk, a spreading stain below his head.
Sarah Brady called the White House switchboard. “I heard my husband has been shot, is that true?” she asked. “Then the fellow said, ‘Hold a minute.’’’
“When he came back he said, ‘We can confirm that.’”
Sarah Brady’s next question was, “Is he alive?” After another pause, the switchboard operator answered, “Yes.”
Jim Brady was taken to George Washington University Hospital. The White House staff sent a car to pick her up and took Sarah to the hospital.
When she arrived at the hospital, she was facing some bleak prospects.
“It was a tough time,” she said. “The surgery took five hours. There was nobody to handle the press because Jim wasn’t there. No one knew anything so there were rumors going around like mad.”
But Jim made it. “Right away, to everyone’s shock and amazement, he came to, right out of the anesthesia. There were three days where we had to worry about brain swelling and other things.”
During the long recovery, Reagan kept Jim employed as White House Press Secretary, even though Jim could only come into the office once a week.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Sarah became busy. She started to volunteer with a group to help end handgun violence. She traveled across the country, gave speeches, news conferences and lobbied politicians.
She became the face and voice of a movement seeking to pass stricter gun laws. The Brady Bill, as it became known, requires gun stores to perform background checks on gun buyers, as well as many other new regulations.
The passage of these new laws came with a high price.
“There have been a lot of death threats,” Sarah said. “My office doesn’t tell me about most of them. It’s not so bad as it once was. They were really violent back in the days when we were winning.”
Sarah recalled one speech, at University of Nevada Las Vegas, when the heckling was worse than usual. “Jim and I spoke to maybe 2,000 people in an auditorium. Jim spoke first for about 10 minutes, then I started speaking. The minute I started, they started screaming.”
About 300 protestors were yelling and trying to hijack Sarah’s speech. “I really couldn’t see because of the lights. I could only hear shuffling, and they were screaming the worst things. I was thinking that I wasn’t going to give up on this. Then it’s getting worse and worse. I leaned back and said, ‘Jim, what do I do?’ He said, ‘Talk fast.’”
Sarah finished the speech and after the building was cleared out, the Bradys left, flanked by police.
Even though hundreds of angry gun owners were moving toward the stage, even though her life has been touched by gun violence once, and even though she has been getting death threats, she continued her speech.
Why didn’t she just leave and not worry about the speech?
“I wasn’t going to quit,” she said.
The Brady Bill passed. To this day, gun stores have to conduct background checks. Many state laws are more restrictive than the federal measure, requiring long waiting periods to purchase handguns, for example.
A couple of years ago, Sarah entered a gun store. Not to picket, but to buy a gun. Her son, Scott, wanted a hunting rifle for Christmas. Sarah found a gun store in Milton that had the gun he wanted.
“At first, they didn’t know who I was,” Sarah said. “They went to the do the state check first, and he talked real loud into the phone. He said, “Brady, B-R-A-D-Y, comma, Sarah.’ Then the man behind the counter performed the same ritual with the federal background check. Brady said there were a few hunters in the store, and she prepared herself for trouble.
But she bought the rifle without any confrontation.
The Bradys live in Dewey Beach year round. Sarah said they bought the house in the early 1980s, and they enjoy the area for the relative peacefulness and solitude of the area, compared to their former home in Arlington, Va.
Sarah, who recently spent a month at Johns Hopkins, undergoing lung surgery, has cut back her activities with the Brady Campaign, traveling to the D.C. office maybe once a week. “Right now, I’m what you would call an honorary chair.”
She is working to ban cheap handguns, known as Saturday night specials, like the one used to shoot her husband.
“It’s because they are throw-away guns for criminals,” Sarah said in an interview before her surgery.
“On top of that, if a person wanted a gun for self-defense in their home, they would be ill-served by purchasing that type of weapon. They are inaccurate, they misfire, sometimes nothing comes out,” she said. “I don’t think they should manufacture something that is unsafe for the person who buys it.”
