And he has some pretty interesting things to say. This is his conclusion:
Now comes the part where we try to make sense of it—and almost always, it’s here that the rest of us fail, over and over. The typical way of dealing with these massacres is to not deal with them at all but rather to resort to hack psychology.
Each rampage shooter “snapped” because “sometimes people snap”; each school shooter “snapped” because they were copycats or wannabe heroes or “sociopathic” or “paranoid-schizophrenic.” However, postal shootings appeared only in the mid-1980s, in what later Congressional investigations agreed was a culture of bullying, harassment, and intimidation by management, thanks to Nixon-era reforms that took away postal union workers’ right to strike and mandated that the service run on its own revenues by 1983—the year the first such shooting took place. The first private-workplace massacre took place in 1989, at the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Kentucky—at the end of a decade of Reaganomics that radically and violently changed the workplace culture, creating yawning new inequalities. These workplace shootings have been with us ever since.
A similar dynamic of denial came into play during the assassinations epidemic. At the time, we comforted ourselves by bracketing the James Earl Rays and Sirhan Sirhans as mere “crazies”—but somehow those assassinations came to a sudden halt in the early Reagan years. In retrospect, we understand them as the product of a chaotic, violent period of political upheaval.
Now, it seems, we have the worst of both worlds: the chaos that Reagan snuffed out, and the socioeconomic violence his policies produced. And that might explain why we just experienced the worst of all murder crimes: a political assassination-rampage massacre.
Read the rest of it here.
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