I'm looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_... and I stand by my "subjective perspective" as remaining pretty reasonable. let me know what specifically you wanted me to plot
I was born in 1970; per your reference, there've been a bunch of state & federal legislators (or recently-former legislators) killed for political (or pseudo-political deranged) motives "in my lifetime" – and far more in the 1970s than in the last 10 years.
In my lifetime, one sitting President was shot at & missed (Ford in 1976), and one was shot at & hit by a ricochet (Reagan in 1981) – again, more in the past than the shots that grazed candidate Trump in 2024.
The Wikipedia-listed murders of other officeholders, like mayors or judges, are also more frequent in the past than recently – especially going before either of our lifetimes.
So trend impressions are very subject to frames of reference & familiarity with history.
I suspect if people in general had a deeper & broader sense of how common political violence has been, both in US history & worldwide, they'd be, on the one hand, less prone to panic over recent events & rhetoric (even though it is concerning), but also on the other hand more appreciative of the relative peace of recent decades (even with the last few years' events).
fair enough. not sure how I skipped over that one.
> So trend impressions are very subject to frames of reference & familiarity with history.
I don't disagree with this. but nonetheless in my lifetime (< 30 years) I have mostly lived through only the "relative peace of recent decades" so the increase in political violence over the last few years is very scary.