The Wikipedia page is useful, and as you've identified the 2025 MN Representative Hortman murder as the "first assassination of a sitting legislator at the state or federal level in my lifetime" – not counting the 2015 murder of SC Senator Pinckney – is it safe to assume you're a precociously-posting 10-year-old?

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).

> not counting the 2015 murder of SC Senator Pinckney

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.