In my column just days after Charlie Kirk’s murder, I characterized its emotional impact on me as the “worst in my 81 years.” Those words prompted one of my regular (and much younger) readers to ask, “But wasn’t the JFK assassination much worse?”

It’s a great question. And without getting into the relative awfulness of two awful assassinations, I’ll confirm that his question made me think back to that horrible event 62 years ago and realize the striking parallels between that grim period in our nation’s history and the swamp of violence we find ourselves in right now. As the old adage warns, those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it.

During the two decades spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, our nation staggered through waves of escalating violence. Those dark years are remembered primarily by the assassinations of three giants of American political history — President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and, five years later, his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King. But that was not all.

The uptick in violence started with the early phases of the civil rights movement. Public opposition to forced busing as a means of desegregating schools (prompted by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954) was fierce. And although MLK’s freedom rides and sit-in protests were inherently nonviolent, the reaction by local police and some members of the public was often quite the opposite.

Public uneasiness simmered and grew, and by the early ‘60s, it had morphed into nationwide backlash and unrest. Integration of previously all-white schools and universities required protection by federal marshals and/or National Guard troops. In 1963, a church bombing in Birmingham killed three young children. And while the shot heard round the world in 1963 was the one that killed JFK in Dallas, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was also assassinated that year. In 1964, three civil rights leaders were brutally murdered in Mississippi.

It went downhill from there. In retrospect, the nation was a tinderbox ripe for ignition. In 1965, in the Watts section of Los Angeles, a single traffic stop triggered six days of urban violence, arson, and looting. The Watts rioting was finally quelled by a massive National Guard contingent, but only after 34 fatalities and thousands of injuries.

Through the early '70s, urban riots and violent behavior were an ugly fact of American life. Predecessors to today’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) and antifa sprouted up in the form of the very violent Black Panthers, the Weather Underground (a spin-off of the Students for Democratic Society) — whose preferred violence took the form of urban bombing — and the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). In 1974, the SLA orchestrated a shootout in a Marin County courtroom and kidnapped a sitting judge, later executing him.

And then, compounding every point of disagreement among Americans, the Vietnam War ushered in waves of unrest, civil disobedience, and riotous protests, as well as corresponding dangerous law enforcement reactions. Who can ever forget the 1970 Kent State tragedy when panicking Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of student protesters, killing four and injuring nine others?

Exaggeration? Not at all. It was a perfect storm of civil rights disruption, anti-war opposition, and political division, all seeding a pervasive culture of violence. It felt like anarchy, nothing less. At the time, I wondered if our nation would ever recover.

But somehow, by the early 1980s, tempers cooled and the violence faded. It’s not entirely clear what turned the tide, but surely the primary factors included the end of the Vietnam War (albeit years too late and at the price of 58,220 American fatalities), growing public support for the actions being taken to address racism, and — perhaps most importantly — an American public that had finally become sick and tired of living in a shooting gallery and began electing leaders committed to stopping it.

The similarities between America 60 years ago and America today are eerie. Just as in those days, we are overwhelmed with escalating discontent, political partisanship, increasingly violent protests, mass shootings, and even assassinations. Can we possibly pull off another comeback?

In several respects, today’s obstacles to restoring civility are more formidable than those in 1980. In particular:

• Just three weeks after Kirk’s murder, it is already clear that leftists (i.e., most Democrat politicians) have consciously chosen not to moderate the behavior that encourages violence, even while insisting that they abhor political violence.

• In some corners, weak policing and judicial practices (e.g., cashless bail) undermine essential steps to curb violent crime. It’s hard to push back on violence if the courts refuse to punish it.

• Media and social media, nonexistent 45 years ago, now saturate the public consciousness with a jumble of information, misinformation, and disinformation — some dangerous and all impossible to untangle.

Our one ray of light is the pervasive and profound public reaction to Charlie Kirk’s killing — a collective vow to find a better way. I believe that Americans today are just as fed up with living in a shooting gallery as were their parents and grandparents half a century ago.

We know how to stop it. So let’s do it.