I'm not sure about your sense of history, especially as it pertains to America. You really mean to tell me that the level of barbarism in this country is higher today than it was before 1908? Before Teddy Roosevelt was the Slave trade, the Trail of Tears, The Civil War, Anti-Chinese laws, Anti-Indian laws, Jim Crow laws, the rise of the Klan and lynch mobs.
Mob lynchings were becoming such a problem during his presidency that Teddy Roosevelt literally mentioned them in his State of the Union address.
And that's just the big stuff, you can apply that at a lower level to sports too. Hell, the level of barbarism was so high in college football that 19 college football players died on the field during one of Roosevelt's years in office. Doesn't sounds like a huge number for the time until you realize there was roughly 1/5 as many football players back then as there are today, so you could extrapolate that out to about 95 players a year in today's numbers. It nearly killed the sport until rules were put in place to lower the level of violence.
Also, there were mass shootings in the 1970's, so I'm not sure what your point was.
Finally.. I hear on the board a lot about the 'wussification' of America and how 'woke' is making us all weak... well, which is it? I don't feel like you can say that the United States has had its tolerance for barbaric behavior raised while also lowering its tolerance for off-color jokes.
