Something that bears appreciating about this relative to other eras of unrest in America is how much less accessible explosives are

There was stuff like the Gunpowder Plot before, but ever since dynamite (it was dynamic!) was invented explosives have been central to terror plots

(That’s an ironic thing about Bostonians getting pissy about Rolling Stone “romanticizing” Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – from the Fenian dynamite campaign of the 1880s to the PIRA in the Troubles, the city of Boston is quite possibly the world capital of terrorist bombing romanticization)

The thing about the 60s-70s bombing campaigns is you could find professional-grade explosives all sorts of places – quarries, mines, construction and demolition contractors, munitions plants, warehouses and railyards, scattered pre-BRAC small military outposts and armories serving a draftee military… and few of them kept under very tight security or inventory tracking

That’s been tightened since; after the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 even precursors to homemade improvised explosives are tracked pretty closely. That requires a pretty extensive and forward-leaning federal enforcement posture; if the feds destabilize or get overwhelmed I could see that being a feedback mechanism pushing to a higher-violence equilibrium

Anyway to give you a sense of how loose things were, at some point in the ‘70s or ‘80s my grandparents had to call in the bomb squad to deal with an attic trunk full of dynamite and grenades my dad and his friends had pilfered from the road crew and the armory in the ‘50s-’60s for the sake of blowing stuff up for fun in the backyard