Stuff like the Thompson or Abe assassinations.

That said, I think the why is more complicated. At least in the US I think there's a general sense that the world is backsliding, and that people feel like any bump on the road of life risks turning into a complete derailment. But this doesn't lead to any one particular ideology or course of action, so much as externalization of angst, whether against individuals, systems, or the "nobody pays attention to our angst let's burn it all down" attitude that's somewhat widespread.

> that people feel like any bump on the road of life risks turning into a complete derailment.

Maybe because in many ways it can be?

Unexpected medical condition -> crushing debt

Police stop goes bad

Job loss for reasons outside of your control

Wildfires burn your house down, or some other natural disaster

for the record, not everyone in the US thinks the sky is falling. it's the same extremely vocal groups as before that do, from what i can see.

Some of us are cautiously optimistic.

It’s not that the sky is falling, it’s that we’re autocratizing. Usually that’s a gradual process.

Think about the recipe we’re seeing: Trump is scaring off career civil servants and installing loyalists whose allegiance is to Trump before the Constitution. He’s ignoring court orders. This is not ok, even if you like some of the policies, because it is democratic decline. It is happening.

So all of us can figure out what we can do … whether it be staying sane, focusing our efforts where they matter, donating, … I don’t have a magic bullet. But this country is worth fighting for.

The US has what from the outside looks like a very odd combination of:

- violent anti-government rhetoric (not a new phenomenon at all)

- huge availability of guns

- explicit links between the two by second-amendment advocates of violence against the government

- very little of what would normally be called political violence (Jan 6 is an exception, but a significant one)

- a huge amount of "radicalized" gun violence against schoolchildren (Columbine to Uvalde, etc)

This doesn't feel very stable. It relies on people's actions never matching their words. As soon as someone turns a gun on an elected representative there's a risk of the situation escalating. Or someone could independently reinvent the carbomb, a common factor in situations from the IRA to Iraq.