I grew up in an age of assassinations. The President, John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in 1963, when I was nine years old. His brother, Robert Kennedy, was killed five years later, little more than a month after I saw him at a campaign event in my home town. That was the same month Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Malcolm X had been killed three years before.
Americans often speak proudly of our peaceful transitions of power, but that is because we are only thinking in terms of political power. Yes, compared to the violence that often accompanied the change of rulers in imperial Rome or medieval England, our transfers of leadership are relatively tranquil. Our system of free elections circumvents the need for violent revolution.
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