[longone]

I don't know if politicians are in on this, bit of a conspiracy that I don't want to get into. However, crime and murder sell. My mother loves to watch the 10 O'Clock news every night but luckily she reads the paper and surfs the web, otherwise I think she might lose her mind. Those nightly news programs are awful. If I only watched local or even cable news and used them as my source for staying in touch with the world I'd think we were living in a complete hell hole. I live in a major city with several local news channels and they are all the same. Just murder and crime and usually some human interest piece at the very end of the broadcast. They report the worst of the worst.

[greedo]

Many would be better off not watching any news or reading any newspapers. Even relying on the Internet makes things tough since there's a firehose of data, and this leads to confirmation bias having a huge affect.

[longone]

Yes, I agree with that. Although I have to say that I think reading the news is far better than ever watching it. When you read it you can take your time with it and selectively choose what articles you want to read rather than having a bunch of crap thrown at you at a high pace.

[greedo]

Agreed. Unfortunately, we've proven remarkably vulnerable to video/film as a persuasive medium.

[navait]

Fortunately, we have HM to reassure ourselves we are so much smarter than everyone else.

[hga]

The saying is "if it bleeds, it leads."

Because of course people are interested in this. And it doesn't have to be a stereotypical, cowelled people meeting in caves conspiracy. Instead it's an "auto-conspiracy", simply a large group of like minded people doing things in the same direction. Not even a "conspiracy" in the usual "it's secret" sense, many if not most gun grabbers are open about what they're doing enough of the time and often about their intended end goals.

That's one of the things that's driving the "counter-revolution", the gun grabbers have let their masks slip so much, have expressed so much hatred towards gun owners, that they and many many people who were just thinking about buying a gun have been buying everything useful in sight.

E.g. Illinois FOID card applications have quadrupled; that's a absolutely solid metric of people who haven't legally owned a gun up to now.