Word: hinckleys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hinckley purchased the ammunition that was used at another pawn shop, this one in Lubbock, Texas. The type of bullet he chose was interesting-and frightening. The cartridges were Devastators, made by Bingham Ltd. of Norcross, Ga. These projectiles, akin to dumdum bullets, contain a small aluminum canister filled with an explosive compound. They cost at least twelve times as much as ordinary .22-cal. slugs...
Upon impact the unstable compound is supposed to explode and fragment the bullet, although most of the ones that Hinckley shot, including the one that hit Reagan, failed to do so. Bingham spokesmen say that the Devastator was developed for use by sky marshals in hijacking cases. By fragmenting, the bullet would quickly incapacitate a person but would be less likely than an ordinary bullet to pass through him or to puncture the outer skin of an airplane. Because of manufacturing difficulties, the company stopped producing the Devastator last...
...cannot be said fairly that John Warnock Hinckley Jr., 25, was destined for infamy...
Says a family friend: "There but for the grace of God goes anyone's kid." Beverly McBeath was no friend at Highland Park (Texas) High School, but she speaks for all her schoolmates when she recalls that John Hinckley was "so normal he appeared to fade into the woodwork." Nonetheless, some time in the barren years since his 1973 graduation from high school, Hinckley went beyond mere ordinariness. His solitude and fecklessness became chronic, and he started drifting...
...then to his climactic infatuations with handguns and a teen-age movie star. Says his father's business associate Clarence Netherland: "Something happened to that boy in the last six to eight years to break him from the family tradition and the family life-style." In fact, John Hinckley's past years seem not to constitute a break so much as Hollywood's slow fade to black...