The county had a population of 200,000, and its main city was both a vacation resort and the site of a college. The analysis focused on handgun purchases and hitchhiking as indicators of fear. These indicators were used to study the distribution of fear in time, place, and the social order. Results revealed that archival data can be used to reconstruct emotional responses to fearful events, that community fear peaks after the objective danger, and that community fear is more uniformly spread than the objective danger. In addition, gun purchases after violent events are demographically similar to gun purchases at other times. Results also indicated that people who respond to acute fear during a crisis are not unlike those who are chronically fearful in more normal times. Figures, table, footnotes, and 30 references