“Fear,” he said. “Used to be something like this happened, it was an anomaly. It didn’t fit in with the fabric of the world, and so people could afford to be horrified not only by the violence and terror of it, but by the sheer absurdity, the impossibility of it. That kid in Texas takes potshots from the university observation deck, kills over a dozen people, and the country is petrified not just by horror but by disbelief. That was in the sixties. Back then, something like that, people could watch it and still not relate to it. Something like that would never happen to them, right? But now,
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