To further your point... last year when that Florida high school got shot up and everyone was crusading to stop gun violence because 17 people died... over 3000 people died in that same week in the US alone due to the common flu. I do a lot of travelling and I haven't seen even a single PSA on preventing the spread of the flu. You'd think if they really wanted to save some lives they'd hand out face masks or hand sanitizer at the airport. Maybe if dying from the flu was more gruesome or emotional it might get more attention...
Amen to that! The lack of any awareness of how disease spreads is another pet peeve of mine.
Schools give "Perfect Attendance awards". Businesses think highly of people who persevere and come in sick.
And yet, that's exactly the thoughtless, selfish, dangerous, antisocial behavior that should be discouraged.
If I ran a school, if someone came in sick, they'd be suspended and get "F" grades in all of their classes or any tests scheduled for that day.
Come in sick to my business, endangering the other employees, and wrecking our overall productivity by infecting my workforce, and you're fired!
Endangering everyone else at a business, school, or in public is borderline criminal.
But back to the subject at hand:
You make a good point that people's perceptions of danger, and ability to assess risk is horrible.
Over 5,000 people die every day from smoking related causes. Less people than that were killed in the 9-11 attacks. And yet, we've engaged in a decades-long war over that. But do we do much of anything about smoking? 5,000 people per DAY! But the slow, gruesome ways people die from smoking aren't nearly as dramatic or "Breaking News" worthy, I guess.
Now we have "The Opioid Crisis". But how many is it killing? Probably not anywhere near as many as cigarettes.
News outlets and politicians love to get all worked up about all of those "gun deaths". But the statistics are weak, especially when you subtract suicides and legitimate police or citizen shootings of bad guys, and criminals shooting each other.
As a normal law-abiding citizen, your chances of being killed by one of these shooters of innocent people is remote in the extreme. Yet the media and gun-grabbers make it sound like it's an epidemic while staunchly ignoring the real epidemics surrounding us.
Wear your seat belt. Quit or don't start smoking. Watch your diet and get some exercise. Get a flu shot. Wash your hands after going out shopping. Now you've covered 99% of your risks.
Being shot in one of these random shootings is so far down on the list of actual risks that we face as to be trivial at best. A risk unworthy of wasting even seconds of your day considering.
And yet, what dominates the news?
Anything spectacular. Plane crashes, shootings, flaming bus plunges. If it bleeds, it leads.
It's always been that way, I guess. People love anything sensational. And the media makes its money by keeping people tuned in. So we get the news we want.
