Assembled from news footage, home movies, and police film, this 1982 documentary tracks the rise of violence in America from the assassination of John F. Kennedy through the early 1980s. Narrator Chuck Riley walks through the shootings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the University of Texas tower sniper Charles Whitman, the Manson Family murders, the Jonestown mass suicide, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, using actual news cameras that were rolling when the violence happened rather than reenactments. Interviews with police officers, prison inmates, and a paroled serial killer sit alongside statistics comparing America's murder rate to other nations, building an argument that gun availability and media coverage feed each other. The film does not flinch from graphic footage, including the Zapruder-adjacent material and prison-yard confessions, and its bluntness is exactly what made it notorious and banned from American television on release. It plays now as a time capsule of a country trying to explain its own body count to itself.