It depends in part on the perspective that you have. If you look at the country over the time that I've grown

up — I'll be 70 this year — or even over the period of time my parents grew up. The country was, I think, a

country that tried to have both a civil discourse and tried to avoid the kind of explosive events of the last

few days. I think that if you go back over the last hundred years, you'll see that up until the last quarter

century, instances of this kind of violence were much more unusual — didn't mean they never happened

— but were much more unusual. And what happened, I think, over the last quarter century is a

combination of things that have made the society less civil and more dangerous. I think part of that has been the rhetoric, which calls into question not only differences of opinion but the

inherent goodness and even patriotism of the people on the other side. It's a culture of personal attacks. I

think that another trend has been the explosion of a media that not only plays the role of disseminating

this — much more widely and much more dramatically than would have ever happened before — also

plays the role of stimulating a level of intensity and extremism in terms of debate that is different, at least

to a degree, than what we've been used to for most of the 20th century. The third thing is the increasing

glorification of gun possession and use. We've always been a society where people have liked to hunt,

butpeoplehavedisconnectedthenormalutilityoffirearmsfromthecultureoffirearmsperse.The

automatic pistol, which has got no conceivable use in terms of hunting and very little conceivable use in

termsofdefense,becomessomethingthat

thepossessionof—andeasypossession

of—becomesalmostamatterofprinciple

tosomepeople.Ithinkallthreeofthose

trendstogetherhaveasignificanteffectin

terms of making events like that in Arizona

more likely.

Now I think those are contributing causes,

but not by themselves a sufficient cause.

You need to combine those kind of things

with a certain mental instability. But the

problem is that we always have had — and

probably always will have — people who are

mentally unstable. And the question is: What

is the culture in which they operate and how

does that culture affect what they end up

doing?

The reason I said it depends a bit on your

historical perspective is that I think we are a

much more civil and safe society than we have been at other periods in our history. While I think it's fair to

point out that probably several more people were killed in Arizona in this incident than died at the OK

Corral, that's a product in part of our increasing population. When events like this happen, they affect

more people, but the level of law and order — and even of civil discourse — I think is probably better now

than it was 150 years ago. I think the unfortunate thing is that after a long trend where a number of factors

combined to make this country more civil, more tolerant, a more safe society, over the last quarter

century you've seen contrary elements that have gone in the opposite direction.