It is an article of faith that political violence has no place in America — or in any civilized country. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “You never, never, never allow the bullet and the bomb to oust the express view of the people by ballot.”
Yet, for unexplained reasons, such violence has dogged our history for centuries. The Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown said that violence “is as American as cherry pie.”
Political violence ended Abraham Lincoln's life at the end of our Civil War.