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that much can be done to reduce those numbers. Indeed, they learn that some measures that could save thousands of lives do not even raise the ire of any but the most ultra-radical pro-gun forces. Gary Fields, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was a case in point with an article he authored in 2008 about a ten-year-old program in Richmond, Virginia. Supported by everyone from the NRA to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, “Project Exile” does not attempt to control gun sales or ownership. Instead, it metes out harsh punishment to anyone who commits a gun crime, no matter how minor, including illegal possession of a firearm. By means of television, radio, and outdoor advertising, the program doggedly reminds local residents that, as a forty-foot sign on city buses says, “An Illegal Gun Gets You 5 Years in Federal Prison.” With bail unlikely and parole nonexistent, the number of guns on the street dropped 31 percent in the first year, Fields reported.45

9/11 All the Time

There was another powerful group, in addition to the gun lobby, who diverted legislators, journalists, and the broader public from addressing firearm violence: the Bush administration. Risks to innocent Americans from gun violence were among a long list of imminent, avertable dangers that the Bush administration chose to ignore during its eight years in Washington from 2000 to 2008, for reasons of political expediency and ideology. (The collapse of the banking and housing sectors toward the end of the Bush years comes immediately to mind as another example where sensible regulation could have prevented a great deal of human suffering.)

How did the Bush administration and its allies dispense with social issues and Democratic rivals the White House found bothersome? They developed an effective machinery for drumming into every citizen unease over a danger the administration insisted loomed larger than all others.

Through a variety of channels, they repeated time and again the eerie incantation: 9/11 can happen again.

Before I discuss how the Bush administration kept that incantation foremost in Americans’ minds and public policy for a full seven years, let me be clear about the gravity of the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. Without question, they were singular in their horror. When nineteen men hijacked four passenger jets and used them to strike the United States, the tragedy tapped one of our most enduring fears—the random, catastrophic plane crash—and multiplied it exponentially. I find it hard to imagine a more nightmarish vision than United Flight 175 plunging into one of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers while the other tower blazed beside it, debris spiraling 100 stories downward. Terrified office workers fled as the towers collapsed; dazed, ash-covered firefighters wandered through the wreckage; citizens sobbed and clutched one another; a huge chunk of the Pentagon lay in ruins from an assault by another plane; still another was a gray gash in the earth; and all of it was replayed on television ceaselessly over the coming weeks.

In the years that followed, America’s culture of fear evolved in a number of ways. First, as I mentioned at the top of this chapter, the basic fear narrative shifted from “there are monsters among us” to “foreign terrorists want to destroy us.” In the first weeks after 9/11, the homegrown scares of the previous three decades about crime, teenagers, drugs, metaphorical illnesses, and the like seemed trivial, obsolete, beside the point. The nation’s collective fear sensibly coalesced against a hard target: Osama bin Laden and his organization, al Qaeda.

The administration of President George W. Bush quickly redirected that fear, however, to what they dubbed the “worldwide war on terror,” a war and associated enemies similar in their vagueness to those denoted in previous decades by the “war on drugs” and the “war on crime.” From those earlier wars, American journalists and their audiences had been conditioned to treat more seriously than they ought shocking statistics that were not fully explained