United States Capitol Shooting Incident (1954)

United States Capitol Shooting Incident (1954)

The United States Capitol shooting incident of 1954 was an attack on March 1, 1954 by four Puerto Rican nationalists who shot 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols from the Ladies' Gallery (a balcony for visitors) of the House of Representatives chamber in the United States Capitol.

The Nationalists - Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodríguez - unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and began shooting at the 240 Representatives of the 83rd Congress, who were debating an immigration bill.

Read more about United States Capitol Shooting Incident (1954):  Historical Context, United States "Manifest Destiny", Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Response, Attack Preparations, Morning of The Attack, Aftermath and Arrests, Trial and Imprisonment, Nationalists Freed, Revolutionary Legacy

Famous quotes containing the words united, states, capitol, shooting and/or incident:

    We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for the salvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    A woman with her two children was captured on the steps of the capitol building, whither she had fled for protection, and this, too, while the stars and stripes floated over it.
    Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)

    Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    I teazed him with fanciful apprehensions of unhappiness. A moth having fluttered round the candle, and burnt itself, he laid hold of this little incident to admonish me; saying, with a sly look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, “That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.”
    James Boswell (1740–1795)