"The Killing of America" focuses on what the director feels is the decline of the United States. It features interviews from Ed Dorris, a retired sergeant of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, as well as Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi. The documentary also shows several interviews with convicted killers such as Sirhan Sirhan as well as footage of murders and news broadcasts. It connects the beginning of America's woes with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and posits that hope of recovery was snuffed out when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 (the film features footage from the Zapruder film and news footage from the night that Robert Kennedy was killed). According to the film the 1960s saw the rise of "sniper" mass murderers who were often white, well-adjusted people that killed people seemingly at random (exemplified in the film by the murders of Charles Whitman). The 1970s saw the rise of what the film calls "sex killers", serial killers such as Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy who also raped and sexually abused their victims. A section of the film also analyses the Cleveland Elementary School shooting in 1979, in which a 16-year-old teenager opened fire on a group of children and staff from her window opposite an elementary school in San Diego, injuring 9 people and killing the school's principal and a janitor.