The Culture of Fear- Chapter 1

Okay in Chapter 1 of The Culture of Fear Dubious Dangers on Roadways and Campuses Glassner talks about the fear mongering of road rage and the PC scare. He concludes by talking about how scares often support each other. In the first section focusing on road rage he goes into a lot of detail about how statistics are not viewed in actuality but get blown out of proportion. This relates to the idea that scenarios fill in for facts. "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," said Alfred Hitchcock, and to this extent many fear mongers use this by depicting wannabe perils as impending disasters. Something that really struck me was the line,"In just about every contemporary American scare, rather than confront disturbing shortcomings in society the public discussion centers on disturbed individuals."( pg 6) This line if nothing else represents the American population's lack of understanding or just their willingness to accept ignorance as bliss. Things like this frustrate me because it's obvious after some simple analysis that people are not the sole problem but rather polices that are implemented in preventing these problems. For example take the road rage scare. Glassner uses the quote on page 7 from National Public Radio's Alex Chadwick,"Roads are more crowded all the time, which means more delays and more frustration," but as Glassner goes on to point out "rather than pursue the point with insights from, say, experts on mass transit..." he goes on to quote AAA who says that driving "frees the beast" in people. From here we jump into the act of the "P.C"(pg 9) scare; P.C standing for politically correct. This section focuses on how college campuses political correctness is an example of a 21st century fear mongering tactic where "the tendency to trivialize legitimate concerns even while aggrandizing questionable ones."(pg 9) He also goes on to talk about how scares like the P.C scare come to be so successful. Glassner gives a short and simple answer "money". (pg 15) Glassner goes on to give an example of this which involves the National Association of Scholars. The very end of the chapter is about scares and how they contribute to one another. Glassner's example,"in which the PC label was actually used to countermand a scientific fact."(pg 17) More specifically the example focuses in on abortion and a study Journal of the National Cancer Institute published in 1994. The study stated that, "having an abortion might raise a woman's risk of breast cancer by 50 percent." Unlike with the road rage scare journalist put the 50 percent into perspective. This study was eventually disproven by another study but the scare had already done it's damage.


The News article I chose is titled Road Rage Cases with Guns more than Double in 3 Years, Report Says; written by Christopher Melle in April of 2017 and covers the increase of guns in road rage incidents.. Click HERE to go to the cite.
Reflection of the Stuff that Relates -
This reflection will but I only focus on the more important details overall. So Melle starts out by giving us an analysis of road rage incidents in the last 3 years that involved guns which was done by The Trace a nonprofit news organization. The study found that road rage cases that involved firearms,"more than doubled to 620 in 2016, from 247 in 2014." The Trace gathered all its data from the Gun Violence Archive, which gathers its data from the news and police reports. The Trace found that in the 3 year span of the study in 1319 road rage cases their was a minimum of 354 people injured and 136 killed.  After these statistics were given Melle jumps to an example, an incident that happened in Terrytown La. Once the example concluded Melle goes into the state rankings in road rage incidents that involved guns and explains that, "states with large numbers of concealed-carry permit holders and relaxed gun laws-such as Florida and Texas- had a higher number of cases" according to The Trace study. A professor that studied crime and gun control said that he was skeptical of The Traces findings. The next line comes from Gary Kleck a professor emeritus of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University; he said, "the analysis would have been influenced by more news reports of cases of road rage involving firearms because when a topic or trend becomes a media theme it tends to lead to even more coverage." Another professor, David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center was also surprised by the reported increase. Dr. Hemenway was also a co author of a research paper, Is an Armed Society a Polite Society? Guns and Road Rage, in 2009. This research paper noted that, "cars offer an environment where people feel safe displaying hostility. The study found that nationally, "...evidence indicates that those with guns in the vehicle are more likely to engage in 'road rage.'" At the end of the article the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety shows up and say, "nearly 80 percent of drivers reported engaging in aggressive behavior at least once in the past year." The article ends with Dr. Aron Pinkhasov, chairman of the department of behavioral health at Winthrop-University Hospital claiming that road rage stems from a person's "stress levels" and "personality traits".