I’ve been thinking about this today. The chickens really are coming home to roost. The US military has spent decades dumping cash and assets into our media to convince young men that the best way to solve problems is to kill “bad” people. We’re primed to celebrate death already. Even in the 19th century when Anarchists were going around killing people who literally hired private armies to gun down strikers, the public was generally unsympathetic to violent retribution. Nowadays violence is the standard even when it’s visited upon the investing class that the military was established to serve. Americans see a bad person getting killed and we’re happy about it because we as a culture now believe that this is the way to solve problems. Considering that this is the public reaction, this could contribute to a solution where it wouldn’t in a more sane culture which would not have allowed a mass murderer like Thompson to kill thousands every year in the first place.