On August 30, 1918, political revolutionary Fanya Kaplan attempted to assassinate Vladimir Lenin who was speaking at a factory in Moscow. She fired three shots, one of which punctured Lenin's left lung. Although doctors were unable to remove the bullets, Lenin survived. Kaplan was executed September 3, 1918.

On July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau, apparently angry at being passed over as the U.S. consul in Paris, shot President James A. Garfield. Although a bullet struck Garfield, lodging in his back, he did not die right away. However, because of incompetent medical care, he became increasingly ill over a period of several months and eventually died from complications on September 19, 1881. Guiteau was found guilty of assassination and sentenced to death. He was hanged on June 30, 1882.

François Ravaillac, who stabbed Henry IV of France to death on May 14, 1610, was immediately taken into custody and transferred to the Hôtel de Retz for safekeeping. On May 27, after two weeks of repeated tortures, he was taken to the Place de Grève and pulled apart by four horses. His parents were exiled, and the remaining members of his family were ordered never again to use the name Revaillac.

On November 8, 1939, swiss clock-maker George Elser attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler at Munich's Bürgerbräukeller Hall with a time bomb. Prompted, however, either by knowledge of the plot or by his legendary sixth sense, Hitler left the building 7 minutes before the bomb exploded. Elser was arrested by border police 100 yards from the Swiss-German border and spent the next six and a half years in a concentration camp. He was executed by the SS only two weeks before V-E Day.

Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, was assassinated on November 4, 1995, while attending a peace rally in Tel Aviv's Kings of Israel Square. His assassin, a Jewish fundamentalist student named Yigal Amir, was angry at Rabin's signing of the Oslo Accords. Amir was apprehended at the scene of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment.

According to the Warren Commission, on November 22, 1963, from a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy with a 6.5x52mm Mannlicher-Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle, serial number C2766. Skeptics, however, have suggested that Oswald could not have fired shots so accurately and rapidly with this weapon and from this position. Expert marksmen were unable to duplicate Oswald's alleged feat during reenactments by the Warren Commission in 1964.

On February 22, 1974, unemployed tire salesman Samuel Byck attempted to hijack Delta Airlines Flight 523 in the hopes of crashing the plane into the White House and killing U.S. President Richard Nixon. After shooting both pilots, Byck was shot and wounded through a cabin door window by police. He then took his own life. The plane never left the ground.

Eligiusz Niewiadomski (1869-1923) was a Polish painter and art critic. He assassinated Gabriel Narutowicz, Poland's first president, on December 16, 1922. Niewiadomski was sentenced to death and executed in 1923.

World War I was triggered by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, on June 28, 1914. Ferdinand was the nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph I and heir to the Austrian throne. He was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist.

During the 1960s, the CIA attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro with a poison cigar, contaminated with botulinum toxin. The cigars were so heavily contaminated with the poison that merely putting one in the mouth would cause death within a few hours. Other methods of assassination considered by the CIA included explosive sea shells, a poisoned scuba diving suit, and a gangstyle drive-by shooting.