Does this man deserve a shot?

The earnest middle-aged guitar strummer asks us to “check out my 18 songs” on youtube and then starts to sing one of them. It’s called “Can’t We Get Along.” He can’t sing worth a lick and his lyrics are laden with cliches but he seems sincere and well-meaning:

“I want to see some love

Can’t we get along all day long?

Think it’s time we do.

There’s so much anger in the world

I wanna see some love.

It’s time for us to change our ways

I wanna see some love.”

The singer’s name is John Hinckley Jr.

Oh yeah, that guy. The mentally ill fellow who became obsessed with the movie “Taxi Driver” (deranged dude played by Robert De Niro plots to assassinate a presidential candidate) and particularly obsessed with a pretty young actress in that film, Jodie Foster.

But how to impress Jodie? How to win her love? Knowing she was a student at Yale, Hinckley rented a room in New Haven and began stalking her, calling her repeatedly and leaving notes under her dormitory door.

After that didn’t get him anywhere, Hinckley hit on the idea of really impressing Foster by assassinating President Ronald Reagan.

Hinckley waited outside the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981 as Reagan made a speech. When Reagan came out into the driveway, Hinckley opened fire. He wounded Reagan, White House Press Secretary James Brady, Timothy McCarthy, a Secret Service agent and Thomas Delahanty, a police officer.

A jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. He lived in a psychiatric hospital for more than three decades; by 2016 he had court approval to live full-time in Williamsburg, Va. And then three months ago he was granted an unconditional release. This freed him to embark on what he called a “redemption tour,” playing his music at venues around the country.

Ticket sales were brisk. He was booked to play at a concert hall in Brooklyn, others in Chicago and Williamsburg and a fourth, The Space Ballroom, in Hamden, CT. That’s right next to his old stomping ground, New Haven.

When I heard about that Hamden show, I thought: What the hell, I’ll go. It got my journalistic blood flowing. This would be a mini-revival of those crazy days when the world’s eyes were on our Elm City. As a reporter for the New Haven Register, I covered Foster’s performance three days after the assassination attempt in a play at the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven. Of course the event sold out. Foster, then 18, was compelling — she played a teenage prostitute serving a prison term for killing a cab driver! You can’t make this stuff up.

Well, none of us will get a chance to see the other person in this drama hit the stage. The theaters that booked Hinckley were so deluged with threats that one by one every show was cancelled. The statement on the website of the Brooklyn venue, the Market Hotel, noted “the very real and worsening threats and hate.” The posting noted Hinckley “upsets people in a dangerously radicalized, reactionary climate.”

Hinckley of course is upset that he won’t be allowed to share his music in person. “I write peaceful songs,” he told the Washington Post. “The climate in the country now is just so bad. I just try to write songs to uplift people.”

Hinckley said he is deeply remorseful for his actions on that day in 1981. Brady, the most seriously wounded, suffered brain damage in the shooting and died of his injuries in 2014. Hinckley said one of his songs describes that remorse.

Now, he says, his only aim is “putting out a positive vibe.” He notes, “We’re living in very, very scary times.”

I think it’s too bad people can’t just calm down and let the show go on. Hinckley should have announced that all the proceeds from his shows would be donated to Brady’s organization that for years has been pushing for gun control. The profits could also have gone to groups working on behalf of mental health.

The man is 67 years old. He deserves a shot at this public display of rehabilitation.