THE RFK ASSASSINATION 50 YEARS AGO TODAY: THE MEDIA,THE EMOTIONS AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT

".....heads lying in pools of blood.   The calmest one in the room was Ethel (Kennedy)......Robert Kennedy had a rosary in his hand, at one point he asked the people to stand aside to give him air.......there was an awful lot of excitement and an awful lot of confusion and hysteria among practically everyone here......"

NBC Reporter Charles Quinn describes the scene when Senator Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles early in the morning of June 5, 1968

"get the gun, Rafer"

Radio reporter Andrew West as the struggle with assassin Sirhan Sirhan is underway

In the early hours of Wednesday June 5th  (315am Eastern, 1215am Los Angeles) Senator Robert Kennedy was shot in the pantry-kitchen area behind a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.   He would die almost 26 hours later.

Kennedy had just proclaimed victory in the California Democratic Primary over Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy before a cheering crowd of a thousand people.

The then cutting edge of media was on hand as in television and the major networks of the time with two of them on air (ABC and NBC) with the third CBS rushing back on the air after an earlier sign off for the night.   (24 hour television was not the norm in 1968 but the networks were on late for political coverage).

In the hours after the shooting Howard K. Smith  (ABC) would offer up a commentary in favor of gun control, just as he had for the JFK Assassination in 1963.  Smith lived in the UK for many years and its worth noting that the gun laws there enacted just after World War I were also enacted in a climate of fear about Communist revolution.

And now fear of violence like the assassinations and riots in the streets in the 1960's would drive passage of a Gun Control Act of 1968.   It would be a "compromise" not licensing firearm owners in the United States, but licensing firearm dealers for the first time.

Links below,,,,,,,,,,,

NBC Live Coverage 6/5/1968 RFK Assasssination

ABC Coverage Including Kennedy Speech With Assassination Coverage starting at 23:30 and video from the actual scene starts at 28:30

Audio montage from RFK Assassination

Wikipedia "Gun Control Act of 1968"