> This survey (which imo is not very robust) simply highlights the fact we are uninformed as a population. This is a failure primarily of our news media (the bi

> This survey (which imo is not very robust) simply highlights the fact we are uninformed as a population. This is a failure primarily of our news media (the big 5) and education. Media gets the most blame here I think. Fear gets views/clicks so they exaggerate and promote a victim mentality to the point where people believe there's a "war on Christmas". They also twist the meaning of words. It's easy for people to misunderstand how Americans feel about "immigrants" when that word is often used to mean both legal and illegal immigrants. I'd expect that distinction matters a lot when it comes to how people feel. > we believe mass shootings are far more common and dangerous than they actually are. A child is ~100x more likely to die from a drug overdose than a mass shooting, and ~10x from a car crash. I don't think anyone seriously thinks that sending their kid to school is more dangerous than a drug overdose or that school shootings are more common than car crashes. I think there's a greater outrage over kids killed in school shootings than in car accidents because cars have always been dangerous (and understandably so) so we accept those risks but there is no accepting that one risk of sending our children into a school is the possibility that a dozen or more will come out in body bags. It's an outrage every time. Especially because children aren't supposed to have guns, and schools (who we have basically turned into full time babysitters for our nation's children) are supposed to protect them. It wouldn't matter if lightning strikes were a more common cause of death in children than school shootings, we'd still be more upset at the shootings since there's no expectation that thunderstorms producing lightning are safe, and very few of us feel that Zeus is supposed to be protecting their kids.