"Violence today is far more widespread than it has ever been, as you yourself pointed out it was more localised in the 50s and 60s."

There's a lot ofv evidence that violence gets much more attention paid to it by the media, and in a very dramatic and frightening way. Stuff that would have been tucked away as paragraph in an inside page gets front page status, more especially when a series of unconnected episodes can be knitted into a narrative about a threat building up. And there's a copy cat element, both among potential criminals and journalists

But I think there is a lot less evidence about an overall increase in violence. I don't rule it out, and I have my own list of changes in society that could have contributed to it. But we should be cautious about assembling a few tragic episodes and building too much upon them.