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I think if we went back to medieval times, we'd be surprised the things people did. Violence was a part of life. The current violence bracket is way less open.
There are also more of us and that makes it so that more of us want the same things. The 'glamour' of western culture also helps to create very individualistic, self-serving people, who all want to be the best at something, or have the most. It creates competition and pressure, more than ever before.
Looking at what is deemed 'violent' these days, and the gratuitousness of many occurrences, I agree the problem has something to do with bad parenting, and also the environment you are in, like Charlatan says.
Where are the bad parents coming from? Apart from the other factors I have mentioned, that have slowly crept up on us, it's all the permissiveness, the fact that people no longer discipline their kids as much, and the belief that they must be allowed to freely express themselves and that they are capable of making certain judgement calls on their own. Over the last decades, we have gained many personal freedoms we did not have before. Now we think they are also our right. Also, the fact that every mental and physical ailment now has a name and everyone has some condition or other makes it so we are constantly paranoid about ourselves, about how we were traumatised, and about how we don't want to traumatise our children.
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Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
Fernando Pessoa, 1918
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