When guns move inside a school’s ranks, and the taxpayer-armed militia abet the crime – preventing parents from aiding their children being murdered in cold blood – how do we defend ourselves?

America’s unvarnished history kept from my schoolbooks, is one of constantly waging war. We don’t drag home loot from other countries to display in our castles – we get paid mountains of cash to make tools for war. Until very recently, you could drive around Burbank and see faded logos of private businesses who’d once fed the local factory that was Lockheed. A proud middle-class affluence.

Growing up on Boeing’s flanks in Seattle, everyone we knew had a job and a house, and our Normal was a great life. How we got that – the real price of grief and carnage we caused – was kept from the airwaves of nightly news. Our only clue was that our returned soldiers were permanently harmed. Easy to trample, in Consumerism’s mad rush for More. Ukraine’s fight is the first time I’ve seen actual war, and that’s only because everyone’s a uncensored broadcaster now.

Seeking to enlarge their markets, the profiteers were encouraged to develop and sell their war tools to local police – and they have. In America, this militia’s been told they don’t have to come to the defense of the unarmed population, after all.