US newspapers run more photos of school shooting suspects than victims (2018)
The upsetting part isn&#x27;t the presence or absence in media reports of particular actors in school shootings.<p>It&#x27;s the fact that the 23 people killed in school shootings in 2018 - tragic as these deaths are - have managed to take away all the attention from the over 3,000 children killed by motor vehicles that year.  I can&#x27;t help but notice that the media of the US is very reluctant to shine a light on an epidemic whose solution invariably involves cutting into the profits of its oil and automobile sponsors.<p>I understand that we have a desire to handle both problems, but to the degree that this these are public policy problems, we also need to remember that opportunity cost (for example, in the form of hearing agendas in legislative committee scheduling) is very real - every bit of attention on one problem is indeed a lack of attention on another.<p>The number of committee meetings in US legislatures (including both houses of congress) over ridiculous cosmetic gun control laws is absurd, while at the same time these bodies barely say a word about the extreme petronormative policies that dominate infrastructure planning and invariably lead to death and permanent disability for more young children than any other cause.