How Politically Violent is the United States?

The really can’t help themselves. In this regard, the ‘they’ are academic researchers who conduct public-opinion polls and then use the poll results to justify what they were going to say anyway.

In this instance I am referring to a survey just published in an open-access academic journal which quizzed 7,255 respondents about what they considered to be justifications for resorting to political violence. The research group are all faculty connected one way or another to a research program on gun violence which operates out of the University of California Davis campus.

Now it’s quite obvious that a group of this sort would not be pushing the idea that violence in the political environment is a good thing, right? But the researchers in this project were not only concerned about how many Americans supported political violence but were looking to identify specific sub-groups within the general population which might be more prone to support political violence, so that we could develop effective interventions to prevent such violence from taking place.

Before I get into the results of this survey, which told me what I would have guess to be the results without actually the reading the survey, indulge ne for a moment while I posit some general comments about political violence in the United States.