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Sociologist Palmer believes that the competitive, increasingly computerized and mechanized nature of U.S. society is creating more and more lost and purposeless people. To a degree, those conditions exist in most industrialized nations. But in the U.S. they are especially intense and combined with particularly American elements that have almost become cliches: the loosening of many moral and social restraints on all kinds of behavior in an increasingly lax society; the decline of tradition and the breakdown of the family; the mobility of American life that so often turns into rootlessness; the U.S. frontier culture of violence and its still lingering love affair with guns—the litany can go on and on. But finally the problem of why the U.S. has so many kooks, and the lack of any final answer, may come down to a dilemma inherent in freedom. The Bill of Rights and the U.S. promise of "liberty for all," habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, all mean freedom for the sick as well as the hale, until a criminal fantasy is acted upon or a mental illness unmistakably manifest.
The ultimately puzzling problem is that there are perhaps untold numbers of alienated Americans who have lost the race for prestige and success, who have had unhappy childhoods, who are uprooted geographically and morally—and who would not think of shooting the President or anyone else. When does the malcontent turn dangerous? When does the harmless kook become harmful? No one can know for sure. One of the costs of democracy is the fact that the dangerous social oddball can lurk anywhere at any time, waiting to act out his or her delusions.
The same conclusion, reached after every post-assassination national self-analysis, is as valid—and unsatisfying—as ever; there is no way to be certain that some frustrated eccentric, determined enough or lucky enough, cannot succeed in his intent to kill. But the acts of Squeaky Fromme and Sally Moore serve as a painful reminder that reasonable steps should be taken to reduce the danger.