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USA Today Opinion Article: Why the Fear of Mass Shootings is pervasive

Warning: This article is using misleading statistics. I’ll leave it to you to read the aforementioned article, but will provide some relevant quotes from the article:

Survey after survey has found that fears of mass shootings are not restricted to school settings. Nearly half of Americans reported in 2019 being worried that they or a family member will fall victim to a mass shooting, and a third say they avoid certain public places because of the threat of a mass shooting.

Here’s another.

Although feelings of anxiety and apprehension must not be dismissed, fears are not always consistent with the risk. But unlike fear of flying or of sharks that can be controlled by avoidance of airplanes or oceans, students cannot choose to dodge school (other than home schooling), and always buying groceries online so as not to face the possibility of supermarket shootout is hardly ideal. One could decide never to attend a holiday parade or a concert, but staying indoors for fear of the unthinkable is an overreaction.

As well:

If there is anything about mass shootings that reflect an epidemic, it is in the spread of panic. It might help restore some sensibility, however, to address two major reasons why fear of mass shootings is so pervasive: misleading statistics and gratuitous news coverage.

And lastly:

The media obviously shouldn’t ignore massacres when they occur. However, by relaying accurate statistics about the risk and avoiding coverage that is more alarming than informing, we can confront the real problem of gun violence without hype and hysteria.

In my opinion, the media is purposely doing this to further indoctrinate folks into thinking guns are bad. I’ll agree that gun violence is bad, but guns are tools…it’s the human behind the gun that’s the issue.

That’s the first article in a LONG while that cuts against the media “grain”. I’m actually surprised it wasn’t buried (it showed in my browser when I was searching for weather info in a Microsoft Edge browser). It’s actually refreshing to see such articles and more such articles need to be published, as a counter to the media’s abuse in spamming readers with skewed and misleading gun violence articles.