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But more, because of a limit to the imagination. It was, after all, 1955. The world was a straightforward place, with a straight-shooting President, a known Red enemy with the hydrogen bomb, and white people and colored separate and apart. Nothing was mixed up; everybody knew where they stood. Things were what they seemed.
You couldn’t be sure it would work at all: newspapers had no commitment to a higher thing called national security, they hardly believed in the concept of the nation, much less security!
Every town, every city, every state, every agency, every country, needed the trained rifleman with the world-class equipment. Life was becoming psychotic. Rationality had broken down. Crushed and shattered by disappointment, political, domestic or economic, many men turned to violence. The workplace berserker, the family hostage taker, the organized criminal gang, the drug security goon squad, all heavily armed.
