Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet, tragedies hit much closer to home emotionally than they did in the past. They also ratchet up the rhetorical framing of tragic events. Even the normally levelheaded David Sirota has called the Aurora incident “terrorism,” even though there does not seem to have been a political motive behind the act. Sometimes a lone nut is just a lone nut.
Perusing reader comments on the web news coverage, I noticed many of them said they missed how carefree life was for kids in the 1970s when they could walk to school or ride their bikes down the block alone without fear of harm. Obviously, these folks missed something. It’s easy to forget that the 1970s were the era of the Zodiac killer, Son of Sam, and John Wayne Gacy. The Charley Project has profiled numerous open missing person cases. The largest number of these cold cases is in the 1970s. Violent crime rates spiked from the mid-1960s through the following decade.
The problem is that too often we look at the past through rose-colored glasses. The FBI assures us violent crime has declined since the 1990s. There should be no reason to doubt this, though statistics are always open to interpretation. If true, even the causes are elusive with everything from video surveillance of public spaces to the delayed demographic effect of legal abortion held out as reasons why. Still, you’re probably safer walking down a city street in the middle of the night than you would have been a few years ago.
Why, then, the frisson of horror we experience after mass killings? Certainly the randomness of it makes us uneasy. But the odds of it happening to you are exceedingly slim compared to mundane causes of death like traffic accidents or lifestyle-related diseases. The root explanation, it seems, may be in what social psychologist George Gerbner called “Mean World Syndrome.” The mass media have zeroed in on violence because it gets people’s attention and boosts ratings…“If it bleeds, it leads,” as an old journalism adage has it. When you see enough real-life violence on TV or on the web, you begin to believe the whole world fraught with dangers.
It’s hard to reason with unreasoned fear. Explaining it as an example of the construction fallacy, that a single incident or even a small number of them do not explain the state of the world doesn’t help. This is a matter of emotion rather than logic. Until the media report the news responsibly and refrain from sensationalism, it will continue to be a mean world for all of us.
© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar
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