One of the takeaways from this article -- aside from the horrible headline -- is that there is a vast untapped reservoir of potential violence in America directly related to the tremendous amount of firearms currently in circulation. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/26/magazine/armed-militia-movement-gun-laws.html

One of the things the "it's not fascism" critics are right about is that it really is remarkable given just how many guns that are in circulation how relatively limited the violence has been.

Of course, that changes significantly if we include police violence in the frame of analysis -- which we absolutely should, since police violence is the direct enforcement of racial and political hierarchies *and* inflected by gun politics.

Anyway, none of this is "new" in any meaningful way, although one potential novel development -- at least compared to the recent past -- is a shift towards more pronounced and deadly extralegal violence.

One question I have is that, considering the incredibly violent nature of American society generally, whether we'd actually notice this kind of shift.

I mean, before the pandemic made crowds impossible, we barely noticed mass shootings in America.

A country that shrugged off Sandy Hook will also shrug off Years of Lead.

The only mass atrocity that has really stuck in a meaningful way in my lifetime was 9/11, and largely because that could be projected onto an external/racialized enemy.