The acceptance of gun violence in Imperial America reminds me of how mob violence became normalized in the Russian Federation. That sort of activity would have been inconceivable in the Soviet Union, but then the counterrevolutionaries laid waste to the Eastern Bloc and organized crime suddenly looked like reasonable means of survival.

Once, in the middle of a phone conversation, I heard some muffled bangs, and the phone went quiet. When I asked him what the noise was, he replied, “Oh, it was just the Russian mob firing their guns in the street.” I thought he was joking — he wasn’t.

I was too little to understand the controversy surrounding the Columbine High massacre, but I later did some research on it and it was almost astounding how everybody went apeshit finding somebody to blame, to the point where the capitalist media got in touch with Marilyn Manson and Doom nerds to confirm that they have no itch to either commit or endorse atrocities. Now? It’s hard to imagine the Columbine High massacre making anywhere near the same impact that it made decades ago.