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On September 10, cameras were rolling when conservative activist, Charlie Kirk, was fatally shot during a live event. He was giving a speech on the Utah Valley University campus when the sound of gunfire cut through the broadcast. Kirk’s 3-year-old daughter and 1 year old son watched in terror as their father got shot. This type of public execution seems like the kind of scene that would stop the country in its tracks, but the reaction online was quite the opposite.

Within minutes, memes, dismissive jokes, and political commentary overpowered the horror. What once would have been a national moment of shock and grief had become just another piece of content to scroll past. “Someone got murdered in front of someone; period,” said AP Psychology teacher at South Plantation High School, Mr. Beasley.

The Kirk shooting, however, is not an isolated incident: it is part of a larger pattern. When asked to describe the current state of political violence in the United States, Micah Mintz, the AP Government teacher at South Plantation Highschool used one word: “rising.” “It’s rising to levels we haven’t seen during the lifetime of people who are living now, but it’s not something we haven’t seen in American History.”  According to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the number of federal charges involving threats against public officials has nearly doubled in the past decade, increasing from 35 in 2017 to 74 in 2022. While big events such as the January 6 Capital storming can break through and grab national attention, people’s reactions often quickly fall to partisan framing. They immediately blame the other party causing a splintered reaction that undercuts a shared sense of shock. Smaller attacks, such as Pelosi’s assault, cycle out of public consciousness even faster. They may catch the attention of the people for a couple days, but after that, they vanish from people’s feeds. The normalization of political violence isn’t just alarming because of its growing rate of occurrence, but also because of its  collective reaction.

Why We’re Numb

Psychologists claim that repeated exposure plays a large role.  “Do you remember what habituation is? Very simply put, it’s a decreasing response to a repeated stimulus. When we see violence over and over, our brain stops reacting as strongly. At first, Columbine shook the whole nation, but now, school shootings barely make us blink,” said Mr. Beasley.  In a quick survey at South Plantation High, about one in three students said that they had seen the Kirk video online. Most said that they clicked out of curiosity- they wanted to see it- but then scrolled past without much thought. This causal reaction highlights what psychologists describe as habituation. Studies show that when violent images and stories continuously appear in our feeds repeatedly, the human brain adapts. What once may have triggered a strong fight-or-flight response in our peripheral nervous system starts to become just background noise (National Institutes of Health). One comprehensive review, published in the National Library of Medicine, finds that repeated exposure to violent media often leads to reduced emotional reactions, diminished empathy, and a greater acceptance of aggression over time. Social media expedites this process. Platforms like TikTok condense even the most traumatic events into minute-long posts that are sandwiched between celebrity gossip, entertainment pieces, and ads.

Violence Through a Partisan Lens

Polarization makes the problem even worse. Both Democrats and Republicans tend to frame themselves as the victims. When violence strikes, the parties don’t see it as an attack on the democracy as a whole, but as karma for their opponents. “As the violence increases, people are much less likely to trust the other side, much less likely to say, you know, maybe our side doesn’t know everything. It’s less these are my fellow Americans with whom I disagree, and more of… those people don’t want us to exist,” said Mintz.

Why all of this Matters

         If political violence becomes routine, the danger expands to democracy, whose foundation relies on the idea that disputes are resolved with ballots, not bullets. When attacks on public figures cease to generate outrage, safeguards and boundaries weaken. The less people care, the easier it becomes for violence to shape political outcomes. Mintz explains a theory that political violence may scare politicians into moving further to the extremes of their political parties’ sides in order to avoid conflict within the party. “If they perceive, kind of political violence coming from the extremes- far left or far right- they could move to the far left or right to kind of be less likely to be targeted by their side. So it could result in fewer people running for office.” Once political violence begins to dictate political behavior, it distorts representation and erodes the principles that allow a functioning democracy to exist. 

         That is why the Kirk shooting is significant. It wasn’t because of who he was or what he believed, but because of how the country reacted. A gunshot on live television should spark national alarm. Instead, it just became another viral clip. “I don’t know the perfect solution,” Beasley admitted, “but I do know this: if nothing changes, nothing changes. And we can expect more violence.”