>

Shit's getting pretty goddamn bleak.
There was actually just a case I watched on Dr. G where a girl smothered a 2 year old and an infant and the people of Bexar County Texas refused to believe a child was capable of this kind of evil.  Then she went to live with her grandmother and smothered her dog which led to the grandmother turning her in to the police.
Life can get really dark sometimes. >

What the absolute fuck? >

Seriously this makes me want to just curl up. Fuck. >

This makes me want to never have kids. >

If they come out bad just smother them >

These sorts of horrible stories have been around a while, but for some reason they now seem extra worrying. >

I think absorbing the entirety of the Country's and World's horrible News stories, across all 8 Billion of us makes the shit seem out of whack and like things are more frequent than they used to be.
There are nearly 350 Million peoppe in the US.....thats a lot of lives to find fucked up stories in.
I dont think most crimes are any worse or more frequent that they ever were, we just hear about them more because we are so connected (save shootings...we have a real fucking problem there)
A 16yo kid(maybe 17) I went to high-school with in the mid 90s killed both his grandparents with a hammer, beat their heads to mush while they were sleeping and then burned the house down...they found him hiding in a dumpster behind a Kmart(or maybe it was a Jamesway, IDR) covered in blood.....I bet no one outside of my state heard about that, and i bet even a ton of people in the state didnt even hear about it...if that happened today it would be national news >

Violent crime (Including shootings) has actually been plummeting downward statistically for the last couple of decades. 
But now we literally hear about every single crime. >

I heard it was rising back up since the pandemic? >

yea back to 2019 levels, not 1970s levels. >

I've moved around a lot in my adulthood and I'm always fascinated by local stories of completely fucked shit that happened in the days before Internet and the 24 hour news channels in these areas that would likely have never been more than a blurb in national news; things that would been front page news for days in those areas, and maybe would've hit a couple paragraphs on page nine elsewhere. A lot of stories that now get national or worldwide coverage fall into that category. For instance, the guy in Mass that searched how to dispose of a 115 lb woman's body wouldn't be heard much further away than maybe Connecticut and Maine. The Idaho murders might have got coverage within a couple hundred miles of there, and maybe where the guy was found in PA (if he would even have been caught back then). Even in the 90s it's unlikely someone in, say, Arizona would have even possibly been made aware of any of those things. It's definitely a contributing factor in why, even though the world is getting statistically safer, it feels more dangerous. >

Its the internet and 24h news that makes it seem like we have a historically bad crime epidemic. Agree fully.
Its all because they all need constant content 24h a day, 7d a week, 365d a year, and "if it bleeds it leads" is a real thing and that boils down to pure human nature and negative feedback bias which is a real thing. >

Exactly. And to add further examples, just look at the slew of crime documentaries like on Netflix, etc. There's just so many from the early 90s and before that most people had never heard about. Whole seasons of shows covering the ones that might have been little more than regional news at the time. Hell, I sat and watched one episode a while back (my wife drew me in because it was where I grew up and was during my middle school years) that was pretty huge news at the time. Everyone knew a ton about it... where I grew up. She'd never heard about it. That's when it clicked. I was like, yeah, I guess it wasn't something a newspaper over a thousand miles away would've bothered with >

While I understand everything you all are saying, but is the idea of social media influence, and younger generations feeling more alone than ever not something to worry about, or...all the shootings?  
I feel like we are experiencing more shootings in schools and the like, or do you also try and make that sound like it's merely the 24hr news coverage?  There are DEFNITELY more guns in America than in the 70s correct?  More shootings, correct?  I can't seem to square that hole. >

You used to be able to bring firearms to school without issue and keep them locked up in your vehicle, or participate in shooting clubs/competition.
If we weren't shooting each other in schools when we were able to do that, but we're doing it now, it's not a problem with the number of firearms. It's the intersection of social media and a nationwide, 24/7 news cycle and firearms that is the problem. >

This is so sad, a family was just torn apart.