Sept. 12 on The Story: After a gunman shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday, the U.S. has been abuzz with the fallout — much of it concerned with the politics of Kirk himself and the 22-year-old suspected shooter. While Kirk's killing is a significant event in its own right, it also happened amid a significant rise in politically-motivated violence within the past decade. Reuters last year catalogued at least 300 cases of political violence across the U.S. since just 2021, starting with the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and determined that it represents the biggest surge in political violence since the 1970s. Kirk's death immediately resulted in calls for retaliatory violence — and that's a very worrying trend for experts on extremism, who see these threats coming close to home. Watch more The Story videos: http://bit.ly/watchTheStory Follow The Story on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheStoryKGW Follow The Story on Instagram: https://instagram.com/thestorykgw