Last week, the massacre at The Capital Gazette joined preceding acts in our mass shooting epidemic. At the hands of a lunatic who'd been harassing the staff for years, the Annapolis newspaper paid a heavy price for doing the work of a free press and the constitution it protects.

Newspapers, from metro dailies to small-town weeklies, are long familiar with threats. Most anyone ever connected with a newspaper office can tell of a story (or two, or ten) involving some disgruntled reader who menaced reporters and office staff with alarming ultimatums.

Those threats have grown substantively more perilous recently, as the President of the United States, his administration and much of his political party lead an assault on the base integrity of the American press.

While the Gazette attack may not have been politically motivated, there's little doubt that those who oppose the idea of independent, honest news coverage are now operating on a hair trigger. The darkest elements in our society have rarely been more emboldened. To see them also validated indicates problems more disturbing than a single crime scene.

It was an odd experience for many of us, this past week, to come across head-scratching exchanges on social media. Even some of supposedly "rational" people in threads were suggesting that the Gazette might have been partially at fault. And still further on the Right, the President's grassroots were clearly not troubled at all with the idea of someone shooting up a newspaper.