As usual, Bob Herbert puts the latest violence in Tucson, Arizona, in perspective. More than 150,000 murder victims in the US for the twenty-first century so far, one million since 1968, according to his NYT opinion piece. His last paragraph:
> For whatever reasons, neither the public nor the politicians seem to really care how many Americans are murdered — unless it’s in a terror attack by foreigners. The two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are to ignore it or be entertained by it. The horror prompted by the attack in Tucson on Saturday will pass. The outrage will fade. The murders will continue.

The FBI publishes annual information on US homicides. It reports 13,636 murder victims for 2009. But the Disaster Center reports 15,241 for 2009. See the 1960–2009 US crime rate table it puts out, based on FBI Uniform Crime Reports. There were 17,034 murder victims in 2006.