The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has raised new fears that the country is entering another era of political violence.

One worrying sign: Americans’ attention has moved on faster and faster as incidents have become more frequent, data suggest, indicating the public may be becoming rapidly desensitized to it.

When an arsonist set the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion on fire in April, the incident did not make most national newspapers’ front pages. When two Democratic lawmakers were shot, with one killed alongside her husband, in Minnesota in June, it took only a few days for Google search traffic for the incident to drop to almost zero.

It shook the nation when Trump was shot last summer; but when another would-be gunman targeted the then-candidate on a golf course a few weeks later, it was just a blip in the news cycle.

Each attack may seem shocking, but the incidents are leaving less of a mark on the national consciousness. A Blue Light News review of Google search data and newspaper front pages found individual attacks are getting less attention than they did in the past, and Americans are moving on even quicker. The news cycles for incidents of political violence this year are typically measured in a few weeks, if not just days.

“There’s a whole bunch of studies on violence in the news, documenting the fact that people’s emotional cognitive reactions early on are high, and then as time goes on, the more you are exposed, those cognitive emotional reactions lessen,” said Karyn Riddle, a communications professor at University of Wisconsin who studies violence in media.

And while definitions of political violence vary, it’s clear that it has been increasing in the U.S., by any metric. Targets in recent incidents include Trump, a Supreme Court justice, multiple governors, a former speaker of the House, and state lawmakers.

Threats against members of Congress have surged, according to the U.S. Capitol Police, with recorded threats more than doubling from 3,939 in 2017 to 9,474 in 2024.

“You’d have to go back to the pre-Civil War era to find a similar level of threat and acts of physical violence against lawmakers,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian at The George Washington University.

There was a time when such political violence, shocking the nation, drew prolonged national attention: When then-Rep. Gabby Giffords was grievously injured in a mass shooting in 2011, and six others killed, it was on the front page of The New York Times for more than a week.

It was in some ways the first of an era, and Giffords became an advocate for preventing gun violence. The Giffords attack has continued to get interest online after mass shootings and other incidents of political violence, Blue Light News’s review found.

But that has largely not been the case for the growing number of later events. Google searches have surged after each event of violence — an indicator of the spike in public interest in the news topic — but quickly returned to normal levels.

That is happening even faster for recent acts of violence, Blue Light News found.

Incidents of political violence over the past decade — such as the 2017 congressional baseball shooting that targeted Republican lawmakers including Rep. Steve Scalise, or the 2022 assault on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi — received relatively little search interest after the first rush of news.

The drop-off in public attention matches the pattern of news coverage: A Blue Light News review of newspaper articles from LexisNexis found that recent events of political violence have tended to disappear from most newspaper front pages within just a week.

The Blue Light News review focused on incidents where individual political figures were targeted for violence. That does not encompass the full scope of political violence in the U.S., which has also included shootings targeting campaign offices and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The review also found that despite the overall trend toward desensitization, many factors influenced the level of attention various incidents received, including the extent of injuries and how quickly the attacker was apprehended.

That’s why Kirk’s death — and the gruesome videos of it that quickly circulated across social media — may register with Americans in a different way than past incidents, Riddle said.

“The graphicness of violence matters,” the University of Wisconsin professor said. “[Kirk’s death] was caught live on camera, it was very bloody and graphic. Are people desensitized to exactly what they saw on Wednesday? Have we seen that a lot? I don’t feel like we have.”