One morning, in the seventh grade, my math class was told to prepare for a surprise standardized writing test. A writing test with no warning in math class wasn’t the weirdest thing we had been asked to do. Jeb Bush was our governor and Florida was a proving ground for what would later be called “No Child Left Behind.” Tests were common and testing different kinds of tests were even more common. You never knew if the test you were taking would change your life or never be seen again. This one was a little bit of both. The prompt was really strange, although I don’t remember what it was. As a life-long test taker (my first standardized test was in the 4^th grade) you become a sort of connoisseur of writing prompts. This one didn’t seem to test my expository or creative writing skills. It just felt like a demand to write and so we did. We wrote for about half an hour.

Almost as soon as our teacher told us to put our pencils down an assistant principle came into the room with a stack of tests from other classrooms. She looked hurried and the security guard behind her with the metal detector wand looked impatient. As she collected the tests from our teacher the assistant principle told us to stand up and wait to be wanded by the security officer. One by one, with arms outstretched, cold plastic and colder eyes brushed our eleven-year-old bodies. When the security guard came to me I raised my arms, looked at the wand and said earnestly: “I didn’t know we had one of those!” He scowled and passed the squawking device up and down the length of my body and told me to sit down. By the end of the period we were told that the morning’s hand writing samples had positively identified the student who claimed to have a bomb. There was no bomb, but that probably didn’t save that kid from juvie.

I am still surprised that they were able to go through the hundreds of essays that fast. Homeland Security hadn’t been invented yet, so perhaps the FBI had helped. Who knows? Before college I had gone through my fair share of bomb threat drills and memorized the color-coded alert systems printed on the back of the teachers’ IDs. You never wanted a black alert. Yellow was nice though; it usually meant you got to watch Remember the Titans until the lockdown was over.

Last week, Nona Willis Aronowitz wrote a piece and did several interviews about the rise of “active shooter drills” in suburban schools. These drills are meant to help law enforcement and school administrators prepare for the kind of disaster that was once unthinkable but now seems more like an eventuality. Aronowitz’s quotes are chilling not because they demonstrate just how gory a school shooting (even a simulated one) can be, but because student participation in these drills fits so nicely into the long list of activities good students are expected take part in:

Kiera Loveless, 17, who has done eight drills before, “thought it would be fun at first. Now I wouldn’t say fun exactly—it’s scary. But a good experience.”

Loveless signed up because she thought it would look good on college applications. The first time she participated, she was “terrified.” She’d only heard gunshots on television. “I didn’t even really have to pretend. I kept having to remind myself ‘this isn’t real, this isn’t real.’”

Co-hosts Molly and John Knefel discussed Aronowitz’s reporting on last Wednesday’s episode of Radio Dispatch.  They rightly pointed out that these drills contribute to a normalization of school shootings, and could do more harm than good. Molly makes the excellent point that while “schools that are already militarized” will probably have to bear even more shooter drills and increased militarization, suburban schools will begin to treat mass shootings like a tornado or some other unstoppable and unpredictable weather event. John agrees: “It’s a very depressing signal of what schools are going to continue to look like.”

Treating human action like the weather—naturalizing it so as to negate, obscure or excuse individuals’ very conscious actions—is nothing new. Karl Marx noted that the assignment of an exchange value to goods and the ebb and flow of commodities markets relied on a belief that these were natural phenomena. The belief that the price of a diamond is just as natural and indisputable as the crystal-forming properties of carbon is essential to capitalism. That is why faith in markets and in the future of this thing we call an economy is so important. If enough people agree that something isn’t worth the asking price, that price will fall. We like to think of that as the “natural” function of markets: something that will happen unless something like the government actively intervenes to “artificially” set prices. The truth of the matter is that all prices are a function of governments’ enforcement of contracts and the active and sustained collusion of corporations with one-another and other planetary governing bodies.

I bring up Marx because, as John Knefel says, school security is probably “a great business to be in right now.” And as Molly notes, “you can never find more money to invest in school lunch, or raising the eligibility for free and reduced lunch, we have to make sacrifices … but there’s always money to run an active shooting drill.”

Indeed, there are very concrete ways government agencies can assure that there will always be money to arm a guard but not feed a child. As much as we like to say “you can’t put a price on human life” corporations and governments do it all the time. It’s actually essential to the way the government regulates industries and justifies expenditures.

Unsurprisingly, despite what the U.S. Constitution says, we are not all equal in the eyes of our government. The same person’s life isn’t even the same price from agency to agency. A 2011 New York Times article describes how the government’s “value of statistical life” indexes factor into regulating industry:

The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the George W. Bush administration.

The Food and Drug Administration declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of cancer victims.

The Transportation Department has used values of around $6 million to justify recent decisions to impose regulations that the Bush administration had rejected as too expensive, like requiring stronger roofs on cars.

The higher the price of a human life, the more money a government can justifiably spend or demand that a corporation spend on saving that life. That must make you wonder then, if the EPA can value a human life at $9.1 million, how much does the Department of Defense value your life? Depends on whether or not you’re the one used in justifying the fighting or the one actually doing the killing. If you’re killed in active service, your family typically gets $600,000. If you’re one of the millions of Americans that are being “defended” by the armed services, your life is virtually invaluable and thus justifies the most expensive military the world has ever seen. We see a similar disparity in how we fund schools: As children that need nutritious food, life is cheap. As potential shooting victims their lives are invaluable.

While the EPA still pegs human life at around $9.1 million, there are plenty of instances where that dollar figure gives way to much more unforgiving formulas: for example the exemptions to the Clean Water act given to companies that frack for natural gas. Here the calculus is all about who could afford to scientifically prove that ground water is tainted and then fund a legal team to sue for the cost of piping in clean water. Even here, it doesn’t remediate the damage or even stop the hazardous drilling. It only keeps that one person relatively safe from harm. The rest of us are left to defend ourselves against the dozens of loopholes and unenforced regulations that make it possible for coal ash and nuclear waste to seep into groundwater by the ton. Tucked away in the actuarial tables of high-rise office buildings and unassuming office parks are what companies are willing to pay when something goes wrong and it kills you. These numbers are disturbingly low. They have to be low. How else could you account for the sheer volume of last year’s industrial disasters? Here’s an abbreviated list of spills and explosions that happened just in North America:

• A Fertilizer plant explodes in West, Texas
• A mile-long train carrying crude oil explodes in Casselton, North Dakota
• 72 tanker cars roll 7 miles downhill and explode in Quebec
• Pipeline explodes near Kiowa, Oklahoma
• Pipeline explodes near Rosston, Oklahoma
• Crude oil pipeline leak in Columbia County, Arkansas spills into streams
• One of the largest inland oil spills in history spread over 800,000 barrels across seven acres of farm land in northwestern North Dakota

Just like school shootings, all of these were preventable, human made disasters that were treated like unavoidable and unpredictable accidents. But while these are undoubtedly disasters, it would be a mistake to call them accidents. Company executives recognize (unlike most of us) that any technological system will inevitably fail if it isn’t subject to routine maintenance and even then there is a relatively predictable percentage chance that something will go wrong. The FAA’s decision to price human life at $6 million for example, is part of the calculation that goes into the maintenance schedules of commercial aircraft. Even if the part still works, the government requires that airlines replace certain parts after so much time because they calculate it is more beneficial (cheaper) to society as a whole to replace a working part than run an increased risk of engine failure. Corporations, on the other hand, don’t calculate what is best for society; they calculate what’s best for the corporation. It would actually be against their legal fiduciary responsibilities to do anything else. But that legal requirement shouldn’t excuse the ruthless calculation.

Companies know that trains will derail and holding tanks will leak, and those eventualities are factored into the cost of doing business. The NRA can handle the economic impact of a bad news cycle caused by a school shooting and ExxonMobil continues to be the most profitable corporation in the world despite near-constant leaks and spills. Freedom Works is being sued out of existence for last month’s chemical spill but Rosebud Mining, the parent company, is doing just fine. It’s the cost of doing business. Industrial disasters are called “accidents” instead of terrorism because they are committed in the name of profit. A freight train derailment is just as calculated, deliberate, and ruthless as a homemade pipe bomb. The only difference is that industrial terrorists don’t know exactly when the bomb is going to go off and they never have the guts to be there when it does.

Its important to remember that corporations aren’t looking to prevent disaster; they’re looking to keep the cost of disaster as low as possible. Executives have to determine whether it is cheaper to lobby congress or invest in renovations and improvements. Sometimes it’s cheaper to just make a better system, but as Marcia Angell explains in her book The Truth About The Drug Companies, lots of corporations find it cheaper and easier to lobby Congress than to innovate in their respective industries.

Making your terrorism legal is the easy part. The hard part is introducing middle class white America to the new (immensely profitable) normal that comports with your company’s business strategy. For the NRA, that means investing millions in school security, thereby implicitly giving up on the idea that school shootings can be eliminated. It’s a way of making your business model seem as natural as the weather. The NRA doesn’t suggest arming teachers because they hope to sell guns to teachers; it’s because that sort of militarization makes gun violence the new normal. Just a few years ago white middle class people couldn’t believe that a shooting could happen in their schools. Today, a teen can put “active shooter drill participant” on their college application.

Routine matters. By routine I’m not just talking about your own day-to-day habits, but what you and everyone else considers to be normal. Not just basic social conventions (e.g. “I should wear clothes when I go out in public.”) or natural laws (e.g. “Gravity pulls things down.”) but the kind of normal we don’t like to consciously think about or dwell on. Normal is poor children starving, soldiers dying, and pipelines leaking. If corporations get their way, normal can also be weekly school shootings, exploding trains, and undrinkable tap water. Anything can be normal if it becomes routine. The sociologist Anthony Giddens likes to say, “In the enactment of routines agents sustain a sense of ontological security.” That is, it doesn’t really matter if its an endless war on terror, drugs, or poverty, people can accept new normals so long as their day-to-day lives are predictable; if they can recognize some semblance of cause and affect. This is a dangerously useful observation. It should be no surprise then, that Giddens was an advisor to Tony Blair’s government leading up to the Iraq War and why the Joker uses this very same line of thinking to cause mass chaos: “No body panics if everything goes ‘according to plan.’” The clown says to the lawyer. “Even if the plan is horrifying.”

David is on Twitter and Tumblr.