Information Age and violent public outbursts

Good evening. I searched this forum back a few weeks and haven’t seen a topic on the shooting events in Texas and elsewhere this past month or so. I am curious if this rise in violence is only perceived or are the number of occurances still in line taking into account the growth of the population over the past century.

Not including actions by government backed individuals, criminal groups, or those directly involved in terrorist organizations, my thought had been that the ease of information sharing and social media has helped bring this issue into the forefront and as an unfortunate side effect of allowing these lone wolf cowards to have a national spotlight if they commit these acts.

How they carry out the attacks doesn’t seem to matter much, if they have enough victims they will get attention it seems. Events in the past history of the USA seem fairly rare, even in the times where you could order a machine gun through the mail.

Is this a social disorder that is being amplified by today’s information sharing or is it something that has always occurred, just not on the scales we see. If it is because of information sharing, barring outright censorship could this be handled in a less sensational manner to discourage future events.

There have been campaigns to get media to stop giving the killers publicity in mainstream media (No Notoriety is an example).

There are similar efforts to get people to limit their social media retweeting, etc. so that the killers won’t get publicity that way. Those are less successful, particularly in today’s highly polarised U.S. society.

I don’t have answers on mass-murder statistics.

This interview with Steven Pinker may be of interest, although I’m not sure it rises to GQ standards of factuality.