I'm intending to have children soon (admittedly later than normal), and it was only in my parent's day that the interstate highway system came into being.
The world has changed quite a bit in not the last few generations. We're in the process of developing new social norms to deal with these changes, so we've got overreactions and underreactions.
In the 1970s, I lived in one of the western suburbs of Denver, about a mile from I-70. At night when things were quiet, I could hear individual cars. In the 1990s when I was back for visits, I-70 had the steady hum of continual traffic.
There are definitely more cars per household than there were fifty and sixty years ago.
I think you may underestimate the degree to which US infrastructure has failed to keep up with increasing use of cars.
The interstate highway system was built in the post-WWII years. It was designed to cope with the amount of traffic that existed then, plus a reasonable buffer for growth. It actually did a pretty good job of keeping up for at least a few decades. Anecdotally, growing up in NYS in the '80s and '90s, I-90 (aka the NYS Thruway) was a perfectly reasonable road to drive along.
As the 2000s came, it was already starting to get crowded. These days, I always have to weigh the extra speed and directness of the Thruway against the stress of driving among so many cars—and, especially, so many tractor trailers, including many double-length trailers.
Other roads may not get quite the same concentration of additional traffic as interstates, but as car ownership in general has trended up, more and more places have filled up with them.
As for guns...yes, lots of people have had lots of guns for centuries. But in 1999, the Columbine shooting showed that disaffected young people could get massive media attention if they shot up a school and then killed themselves. It has been fairly well proven by now that the media attention given to these events is a significant driver of more such. You even comment on this, but don't appear connect it to the rise of mass shootings in the modern era.
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There's also a second phenomenon at work here. There's been a very strong streak of sensationalism in the media about children in danger that, from what I've seen, mostly started in the early '90s. There was a prominent disappearance in the Upstate NY area around that time (the Sarah Ann Wood case) that stayed in headlines for years; the JonBenét Ramsey case was also in the mid-'90s, and much more nationally sensationalized.
In general, there was an increase in pushing the "stranger danger" idea during that time, and...guess who are the parents now? The people who were young and impressionable growing up during that era.
This can't possibly be the cause. The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon.
Similarly, bad guy have had loads of guns in the US since even before the US was a thing... yet again, this is a modern phenomenon.
> Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more.
I'm in complete agreement here. The media goes wall-to-wall with every mass shooter every time, turning them into some sort of sick idol for all the other mentally unstable wannabe's. Sometimes the media even reads these people's manifestos on air... it's just insane behavior.
> Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?
Paranoid, but also mentally diseased. We've constructed a society where it's totally acceptable to be mentally ill and entirely on your own. Today, even small cities have homeless camps filled to the brim with mentally ill that desperately need help - yet our policies give them free needles to enable them to continue doing drugs and ruin their lives.
It's horror disguised as compassion - compassion that ends up killing people.