Savor this week's news for story you didn't read

It isn't the biggest news of the week, but it is the biggest non-story for those of a certain age:

Nobody killed President Obama.

It was taboo to even voice those kind of fears this week with all that hope and history taking place. But many of us flinched when we heard the booming cannons of the inauguration's 21-gun salute. Americans in the Baby Boomer generation were scared (and remain worried) about one of the saddest parts of our U.S. heritage - assassinations.

I watched John F. Kennedy's funeral on our black-and-white TV in the kitchen when I was 5 years old, while my mom ironed. I was fascinated by the riderless horse with boots set backward in the saddle's stirrups, and the salute by his young son. President Kennedy, of course, was gunned down Nov. 22, 1963, while riding in a convertible down a Dallas street.

The man charged with assassinating Kennedy was shot to death on live TV on Nov. 24 by another gunman as millions of viewers watched.

In 1965, a team of assassins blew away Malcolm X as the African-American activist was about to give a speech in New York. Two years later, American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell was shot to death by a sniper in a Virginia shopping center.

But 1968 would be the Year of the Assassination. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr., the 39-year-old Nobel Peace Prize-winner, was shot dead in Memphis. Shock and riots followed all the way through that summer.

As a 10-year-old, I was at a sleep-over on June 5, 1968. As I went to the kitchen for breakfast the next morning, my buddy's mom was crying. Robert Kennedy had been shot dead in California.

Two of Kennedy's bodyguards were Roosevelt Grier, part of the famed Los Angeles Rams' "Fearsome Foursome" defense that ravaged the NFL, and Rafer Johnson, gold medal-winner of the Olympic decathlon. If Rosey Grier and the guy on the Wheaties box couldn't stop an assassination, who could?

On May 15, 1972, presidential candidate George Wallace was shot four times. Wallace was paralyzed from the waist down.

And still the assassination attempts raged on.

Schemes to kill Richard Nixon never came to fruition, but one 1974 plot became the basis for the movie "The Assassination of Richard Nixon" starring Sean Penn.

In 1975, Lynnette "Squeaky" Fromme pulled out a handgun and pulled the trigger four times while Gerald Ford was attempting to shake her hand. The gun had an empty chamber and no shots were fired.

Just 17 days later, Sara Jane Moore fired a gun as President Ford was outside a hotel in San Francisco. A decorated Vietnam-era Marine named Oliver "Billy" Sipple grabbed Moore's arm, causing the shot to miss Ford, and prevented the would-be assassin from firing another shot.

Sipple, a homosexual, was outed by gay activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated himself in 1978 - an act of violence that also became a movie starring Sean Penn.

While he wasn't a political candidate, John Lennon's murder by a crazed gunman in 1980 was another grim reminder of how violent our nation can be.

In 1981, just 61 days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan nearly died after being shot outside a Washington hotel. Initial reports said Reagan's press secretary, James Brady, died from a shot in the head. But Brady lived and, with his wife, Sarah, has fought for gun control ever since.

With so many U.S. assassinations to choose from, Stephen Sondheim narrowed his 1991 musical "Assassins" to the stories of nine people who killed, or tried to kill, U.S. presidents.

But 1981 also saw a gunman critically wound Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. Later that year, Nobel Peace Prize-winner and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was killed during a parade when a military team of assassins opened fire.

There have been tragic assassinations outside the United States since our last presidential killing. In the last quarter century, we've seen the assassinations of prime ministers Indira Gandhi (1984) and her son Rajiv (1991) in India, as well as Yitzhak Rabin of Israel in 1995. Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto was killed in 2007. But U.S. presidents have been safe.

Let's give thanks for that, and hope that younger Americans never have the memories we older ones do.