Whatever your views on gun rights and gun safety, this 1938 photograph of a joking vice president, John Nance Garner, thrusting two pistols into Missouri Senator Harry Truman’s chest probably has some element of shock.

For us in the world of 2014, the notion of a gun so close to an American leader is not funny, only heart-stopping. We know that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by gunfire (as was his brother Robert), Ronald Reagan nearly so, and that as president in 1950, Truman himself was stalked by pistol-firing Puerto Rican separatists on the steps of Blair House.

Today only the most insensitive high official would pose for such an image, which shows Garner clowning with two six-shooters once used by the notorious Jesse James, who hailed from Truman’s home state. But in fact, Garner’s gag should not have been very amusing even in 1938: Five years earlier, Garner, the parboiled-looking Texan now most remembered for a sanitized version of his private complaint that being vice president was “not worth a bucket of warm piss," had almost become president when a gunman in Miami nearly murdered President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and instead killed Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago.

There is also this layer of grim coincidence: On the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, it was Garner who received the second-to-last telephone call ever made by John F. Kennedy — from his Hotel Texas suite in Fort Worth, wishing “Cactus Jack,” as Garner was known, a happy 95th birthday — before the 35th president departed for Dallas.