American politics has long personalized its violence. Time and again, history's advance has been imagined to depend on silencing or destroying a single figure.

The day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University, commentators repeated a familiar refrain: “This isn’t who we are as Americans.” Others ...

Others similarly weighed in. Whoopi Goldberg on “The View” declared that Americans solve political disagreements peacefully: “This is not the way we do it.” Yet other awful episodes come immediately ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Others similarly weighed in. Whoopi Goldberg on “The View” declared that Americans ...