My mother watches cable news a lot. And she’s on social media—especially Facebook—a lot. When we spoke Wednesday, she asked me if I’d heard. “About what?” I asked. “San Bernardino,” she replied. I had heard, but had forgotten about it for the previous couple of hours, thanks to my weekly volleyball match. Playing makes me feel like a kid again.
“What’s this world coming to?” she asked, bringing me back to the present. After so many mass shootings, she told me she’s afraid that life in America is getting more dangerous, that nowhere in this country can one feel truly safe. She’s not alone. Social media, the internet in general, and the 24-hour news cycle only feed these fears.
Before I start offering data, let me say that I understand why some people will not want to hear this. Some may even think that the more scared Americans get about gun violence, the more likely it is we’ll pass laws that will reduce it. Maybe, maybe not.
What we have seen in the recent past is that fear about crime—as well as crime rates actually rising from the mid-1960s through about 1990—led to our country to embark on a misguided, incredibly harmful set of policies that resulted in mass incarceration, particularly affecting African-American men. Furthermore, heightened fear of terrorist violence—which can of course be perpetrated by people of any race or religious background—has, shall we say, not brought out the better angels of our country’s nature in recent times.
Now, about that data.
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