Most obviously, the rise of rage massacres represents a profound social derangement. At the very least, it’s positively perverse to talk about gun massacres without some discussion of America’s permanent imperialist wars and the impact they’ve had on the culture. The Great War lasted four years; the US has been occupying Afghanistan for eleven years and Iraq for nine. You cannot maintain combat operations for that length of time without fostering, both deliberately and otherwise, a militarism closely connected to a sense of personal liberation through violence. War is carcinogenic to the body politic, and the cancers it generates appear in all kinds of unexpected ways.
Yet that context – the unprecedented legitimation of violence provided by years of brutal war – almost never enters the debate. If, as Ballard once said, the suburbs now dream of violence, shouldn’t the first question be why? Consider: after the Colorado shootings, well-meaning journalists anguished about how the news might be reported without inspiring fresh crimes. Their worries were not unfounded – immediately after the massacre, tribute pages to the killer proliferated on Facebook; within a few days, a would-be copycat was arrested. But what does it say about a society if random acts of murder now exercise so great an attractive power that it becomes dangerous to even speak of them?