Shootings

Although the massacre in Newtown is not the type of rebellion-like rampage massacre that I usually write about — where employee attacks his workplace and his co-workers, or middle-class school kids attack their school and fellow students — a few things about the culture around this crime stand out.

First, Connecticut has the second worst rate of income inequality in the US, thanks to all the Wall Street fundies and insurance executives who live secluded from some of the starkest poverty outside of the Deep South. Even more telling is the way Connecticut degenerated from the late 1970s, when it was one of the most egalitarian states in the union, to today’s banana republic-levels of inequality. One study ranks Connecticut as having the fastest-growing rate of inequality since Reaganof executive compensation. Meantime, the paycheck of the typical worker grew only 34%. "We're back to serfs and royalty in the Middle Ages," declares Edward Lawler, professor of management at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. And that's before the passage of President Bush's tax-cut plan, which would widen the advantage of the upper crust on an aftertax basis.'

That was Businessweek way back in 2001 — but no one in DC took it seriously.

In 2004, with the NRA bragging that it owned President Bush, Clinton’s assault weapons ban was lifted, and the inane theory that more guns equals greater safety was given another try. The result: Rampage massacres migrated from workplaces and schoolyards to a new setting, college campuses. And why wouldn’t they? The same