I wouldn’t have anticipated when I wrote this in 1999 after the mass shooting at Columbine that it would have been the first of so so so many heartbreaking examples... As I wrote, "The reason why this country has such a high rate of violence include the plentiful guns that make killing seem as unreal as a video game; male violence in the media that desensitizes viewers in much the same way that combat killers are desensitized in training; affluence that allows maximum access to violence-as-enteratinment; a national history of genocide and slavery; the romanticizing of frontier violence and organized crime; not to mention the extremes of wealth and poverty and the illusion that both are deserved." Whatever the reasons, they are buried deep in the culture, so invisible that only by reversing our assumptions can we reveal them.