The U.S.S. Constitution first sailed on October 21st, 1797. It is still in service today and a currently commissioned vessel with the United States Navy. That makes it, according to the U.S. Navy, the oldest currently serving warship on Earth.
Notably, the Constitution, nicknamed “Old Ironsides,” served during the War of 1812 and was one of the six original ships commissioned by then President George Washington to serve as the basis for the newly created U.S. Navy.
This past week, the ship took a stroll around its home port in Boston in commemoration of the Battle of Bunker Hill, which took place on June 17th, 1775. As the Constitution is an actively serving U.S. naval vessel, it’s maintained and ready to sail at a moment’s notice, like any other Navy ship or boat.
During the 18th and 19th century, the Constitution had a complement of 450 sailors and marines to sail and fight. In the 21st century, it has a crew of at least three officers and 85 enlisted sailors. Its current Commander is Crystal L. Schaefer who has the privilege of being the 78th Commander of the ship.
Old Ironsides
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In 2026, the Constitution serves mostly as a training vessel and symbol of how the Navy has evolved over the centuries. But during the time of its construction, the Constitution was thoroughly high-tech. The “Old Ironsides” name comes from the fact that, although not made of iron, the ship’s wooden hull was seen deflecting British cannonballs. On August 19th, 1812, the British Royal Navy’s HMS Guerriere fired an ineffective broadside towards the Constitution. The story of the battle says that a U.S. sailor said “Huzza! Her sides are made of iron! See where the shot fell out!” Including the Guerriere, the Constitution would end up sinking four British vessels during the war.
For armament, the 305-feet long, 1,900-ton displacement Constitution has 55 total guns spread between the upper deck and lower deck. The 24-pound long guns reportedly had a range of up to 1,200 yards. For comparison, a Tomahawk missile fired from a modern missile cruiser has a range of 1,500 miles.
In 1812, internal combustion hadn’t been used for propulsion yet, so it relied on 48 sails to get going to a top speed of 13 knots, or around 15 miles per hour.
Another day, another politically motivated attack in the United States.
This morning’s shooting at a Dallas ICE detention facility – where a sniper killed two detainees and wounded another before taking his own life prompted me to revisit a question that’s been troubling me: Is political violence actually increasing in America, or does it just feel that way?
To explore this, I’ve conducted what I’ll call a methodological experiment.
Rather than relying on traditional datasets, I’ve used ChatGPT and Claude to construct a synthetic index of political violence in the US since 1945. Let me be absolutely clear: this isn’t conventional data. It’s data generated through language models, with all the limitations that implies.
The Methodology (and Its Limitations)
Here’s what I did: I asked both ChatGPT and Claude to generate lists of politically motivated violent incidents since 1945, then had them score each incident’s severity on a scale where 50 represents a “normal” level.
The models assessed both casualties and symbolic significance, and I used them to cross-check each other’s work. I then quality-checked the output myself and categorised perpetrators by political affiliation where this was clearly established.
This approach is, admittedly, unorthodox. Language models are trained on existing texts and may reflect biases in their training data. They might overweight highly publicised events or recent incidents that featured prominently in their training corpus.
The “data” we’re looking at is essentially a structured synthesis of what these models have absorbed about American political violence.
Yet there’s something intriguing here. These models have processed vast amounts of information about political violence – news reports, academic studies, government documents. Their output might capture patterns that traditional datasets miss, though it might also amplify certain narratives or blind spots.
What the Synthetic Data Reveal
With those caveats firmly in mind, the patterns that emerge from this exercise are concerning. The model-generated index shows a clear upward trend in political violence over the past decade.
Looking at the breakdown by perpetrator ideology (where clearly established), the data suggest that right-wing extremist groups have been responsible for the majority of incidents in recent years, though we cannot draw conclusions about today’s attack whilst investigations are ongoing.
The synthetic data align with some empirical observations. Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative recorded over 600 incidents of threats and harassment against local officials in 2024 – a 74% increase from 2022. The University of Maryland found that in the first half of 2025, 35% of violent events targeted U.S. government personnel or facilities – more than twice the rate in 2024.
The Charlie Kirk Assassination and Recent Patterns
The September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk marked a particularly dark moment.
The incident followed numerous recent acts of political violence, including the murder of Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, and two assassination attempts on President Trump in 2024.
What the synthetic data reveal is not just increased frequency but a shift in patterns. While overall levels of physical political violence remained low in 2024 compared to years prior, acts of vigilante violence grew as a proportion of all reported incidents.
We’re seeing less organised group violence and more lone-wolf attacks – a pattern that’s harder to predict and prevent.
The Epistemological Challenge
When we use language models to generate “data” about social phenomena, what exactly are we measuring? We’re essentially extracting structured information from the collective corpus of human writing about these events. It’s aggregating distributed information, but through an AI intermediary rather than traditional data collection methods.
This raises fascinating questions.
The models suggest that right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for a fairly large majority of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001. But how much of this reflects actual patterns versus the way these events are covered and discussed in the sources the models were trained on?
The synthetic data are, in a sense, a mirror of our collective discourse about political violence. They reflect not just what happened, but how we’ve talked about what happened. That’s both a limitation and, potentially, a feature – understanding the narrative landscape around political violence might be as important as counting incidents.
An Experimental Tool
I’ve built an interactive app (using the AI coding tool Lovable) based on this language model-generated violence index.
Users can explore the synthetic data, examine patterns across different time periods and perpetrator groups, and understand the methodology behind it. Think of it as an experiment in using AI to structure historical information rather than a definitive dataset.
The value isn’t in treating this as gospel truth, but in what it reveals about how these events are recorded, remembered, and synthesised in our collective digital memory.
When language models trained on our civilisation’s text output show rising political violence, it tells us something – even if that something is as much about narrative as about underlying reality.
This morning’s tragedy in Dallas reminds us that behind every data point – whether traditionally collected or AI-generated – there are real victims and real consequences. Understanding the patterns, however imperfectly, is the first step toward addressing them.
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