JOHN KENNEDY, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, George Wallace, now Ronald Reagan. For the last two decades, American history has been pockmarked, redirected, twisted by bullets. It is cause for jubilation that the president survived Monday's attempted assassination; the bloody scene outside a Washington hotel, though, is also cause for despair. Despite all the lessons, all the grief, we have failed to end the reign of violence that is our shame.

That violence threatens directly our democracy; we have constituted here a nation supposedly ruled by choice. But when one man with one gun can kill a leader--and with him, often, the ideas and desires he stands for--democracy is a farce.

There is only one way to end the mindless violence of political assassins and that is to end the mindless violence that permeates so much of the rest of America. A society that allows capital punishment as a way to deal with crime; a government that uses the blunt threat of military force to solve its international problems; a nation that allows its citizens to carry deadly weapons with impunity--this is a society that begs for violence. Perhaps the shock of Monday's gunshots will start to convince Americans of all political persuasions that the time has come to trade force for reason, violence for peace, the right to bear arms for gun control. If it doesn't, the list of men and ideas felled by bullets will only grow.