Taronus said:
Counries with school shootings: USA
Countries with violent video games: ALL
Countries with with lax gun laws: USA
Yes,it is obviously the video games' fault.
Well more accuratly the big issue is the USA having an out of control media. We pretty much let the media sensationaalize just about anything they want to, and broadcast it internationally. Since everyone cares about the USA (whatever they might claim) everyone also tunes right in to hear about it, and it stays in the news longer.
When people attempt to cause mass casualties in other countries it's a relative foot note. For example in China some guy went berserk in a school with a knife before being taken down, like the day before "Sandy Hook". It didn't get one tenth the press coverage, and honestly, it's amazing we even heard about it to the extent we did because most countries try and keep their dirty laundry like that in the country and compartmentalized instead of broadcasting it everywhere.
The thing is that when you look at murder sprees and such in general, the US isn't so bad, but it takes more digging, and also the desire to remember them. Also there is a tendency among everyone in the world to value what happens elsewhere less, because the USA is pretty much the most dominant and enlightened culture, and sets a standard, it's nice to take a chunk out of us once in a while, and while everyone agrees we're more or less "tops", they tend to think of anyone other than us and themselves as comparitively barbaric.
Do a search for something called "Three Guys One Hammer" (Encyclopedia Dramatica used to have links to the video, but I believe they took it down), it's fairly old right now, but the bottom line was that it was a bunch of kids in Russia (I believe) torturing and killing this dude for fun while recording it on their cell phone. It's been a while, but the bottom line is that this only got it's 15 minutes of fame because it made it on the internet as a shock video. The apprehension of the guys that did it was barely a footnote comparitively speaking. Nobody much cares or remembers it now, or thinks of it in cases like this, because it's not the USA, and pretty much anyone else around the world probably to some degree think "the people there are animals, so it's expected", which was in part what you heard when this video was "new".
Someone sets off a nail bomb in a school in Poland or whatever, and you might hear about it for five minutes, but globally speaking nobody cares, and neither does the media. In part because the Polish authorities will probably be far more assertive in dealing with the media to prevent it from being turned into this kind of a circus (which gets into other issues like relative "Freedom of the Press" as well... globally speaking, not just about Poland).
... and yes, part of the reason why you hear about it is because people want to point fingers at the USA and say "The USA sucks" which is part of "caring". As I said, a tradgedy elsewhere tends to just be "duh, expected".
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Also as a side note I'll say that the problems we're looking at aren't exactly recent either. The US, like most countries, has had non-stop dark moments since it was formed, it's just that the media wasn't in a position to distribute the information on a large scale. Some horror writers have pointed out that while doing research for books all they need to do is go into archival newspaper footage, and they will find something truely, beyond the pale, F@cked up, in the history of pretty much any town you can think of, and a grain of truth behind just about any "local" or "urban" legend. This is what inspires so many writers to have characters in their works do "research" in town archives and such to find why hauntings and such occur, because it's remotely plausible, since everywhere has
something like that.
See, if someone went into a school in a relatively small town with a Tommy Gun and iced 30 or so kids in the 1930s, the odds of anyone outside of the area knowing about it were prety much non-existant. There was no internet, radio was comparitively crude, and newspapers could only be distributed as far as trucks could carry them and few people cared about what happened outside of their area (except for big, federal, headlines). Also to be fair shock journalism has always been around, but it's only been fairly recent (within a few decades) where it's become the bread and butter of reporting.
That's my thoughts at any rate. Consider that one of the things that made Hoover so famous in his gangster hunts and such is that he was able to get media coverage, and was one of the very first people to use the media so heavily for crimes. He did a lot to get people's pictures, stories, etc... out there. Even as late as the 1960s you had criminal gangs (like bikers) virtually taking over towns because everything was so compartmentalized and it was hard for people to tell what was goin on where, or mount effective responses, and as many people will point out even when things sucked here the USA was pretty bloody well off compared to the rest of the world. It's not that things have changed, you just hear about it more, indeed things are probably the best they have ever been for the first world, but increasing information gathering and distribution technology means that we're simply more aware so it seems like the opposite is true.
