Spot the Americans

This Reddit thread about an Amsterdam shooting is an interesting case study in the power of American media.

You can quickly tell who is Dutch (or culturally assimilated) by the flippant reactions. Shootings in the Netherlands are almost exclusively connected to organized crime and rarely involve random bystanders. Hence the Dutch reactions in the thread are jokes (“just a shooting”) or dog whistles (these types of things are rarely done by ethnically Dutch people, and news stories always contain clues to this such as “Dutch national” or “born in the Netherlands”).

Then you can see the reaction of the Americans (or those in the mainstream US media bubble): “I thought Amsterdam was so safe” or “My thoughts are with the victim”.

Amsterdam is exceedingly safe, except for bike theft. But Americans are programmed by the media to associate any shooting with a real risk of randomly being killed. And every news story needs a heroic victim, with whom your thoughts can be with (whatever that means).

When you dig out the statistics, gun violence in the US isn’t that different than many European countries. Random mass shootings are exceedingly rare, but statistically you’re more likely to be in one in Norway or Denmark than the US.

None of this is to say that US gun laws aren’t in need of reform. They clearly are. But that’s a separate discussion.

What strikes me is how powerful the media narratives are: even people who have been outside of the US for a decade can interpret local events only through the prism of the latest NYT storyline.