Agenda Setting Theory

With the snowballing increase in technology and news availability few things go unnoticed these days, this can be not only viewed as a blessing but also a curse. There was once a time where people had to wait until the morning newspaper to find out what happened the previous day and that was considered groundbreaking. Now everything from NFL football injuries to congress passing a bill to some routine traffic stop gone bad can be found out almost instantaneously in todays society.

I remember not too long ago when there was an asteroid heading towards earth and they discovered that it would breach the atmosphere somewhere above Russia that it would be really neat to see the footage of the event but it was almost 13,000 miles away and we would have to wait a while for the news to filter what we should and should not see. Amazingly, almost as soon as I found out the destination of where it was going to land videos began popping up all over the internet! It was a great way to globally dominate everyone's attention to one incredible event.

But with the good always comes someone that can capitalize people's attention and drive to flock towards certain media, and interestingly enough it seems that most people are more attracted to scandalous activity than disaster lately. Last year at the always classy Music Television Video Awards an extremely low-brow performer decided to engage in an age-old stripper technique recently coined as "twerking". This was a cheap and typical way of the new generation bringing back an old public relations technique called "Hucksterism" in which the policy is "any publicity is good publicity".

As obnoxious and beaten to death this topic is it was actually effective and proves that we seemingly are going to be amused the same way people used to with this technique (fake taxidermy mermaids and 3 headed dogs). But the part that interests me is what was actually happening at the same time that this blanket story was thrown over the media. Behind the scenes of all of this adolescent cry for help lies a whisper of the executive order that has been brewing for months prior, an executive order about drones and whether or not they should or should not be imposing on our civil liberties. Nearly every class that I was taking that semester would ask how we felt about the VMA's and nothing to do with the huge imposition on civil liberties that was being under-reported right under our noses (which when I mentioned it none of the students had any idea what I was talking about).

Where this all comes together is just a symphony of the agenda setting theory. The media deliberately seems to lean more towards the easy news rather than the complex news because either no-one wants to spend the time to know why things are going on with politics or they're too occupied trying to guess what the Kardashian's favorite flavor of flan is. This can be seen almost everywhere, you check out at a supermarket for instance and look at the magazines, almost all of it is gossip about people who 99% of us will never meet, and the closest thing that informs you about foreign policy is maybe Time magazine at best. I'm not going down the avenue of saying that all of this is just more than convenient timing between the two events, however, when it comes to the metaphorical cannon of news, they're aiming it.

Jan 31

In 2011 a person owning a Glock 9mm pistol with a high capacity magazine felt as though it was his destiny to go out with a "bang". Jared Loughner came up to Arizona's congresswoman and opened fire. The gun can is loaded with something called a "magazine" which is an interchangeable container of bullets regularly holding 10 bullets before a reload. The magazine or "slide" during this assault is what is known as an extended magazine containing nearly three times the amount of ammunition of a normal pistol.
      Clearly this was a premeditated operation and there is no question that the Jared went out with the intention to injure as many people as possible; but the response to this tries to take yet another bite out of the constitution in a manor which probably isn't in the best interest of "we the people".
      Yes the really is no practical reason to have 18+ rounds in a magazine for a hand gun but to propose a magazine have a limited number of bullets is absolutely intrusive. The 2nd amendment to the constitution establishes that there are several functions for owning a firearm. The article that I found on the huffington post seems to be as liberal as most of the articles on the internet talking about how guns are either for hunting or self defense. Where in reality there is a third purpose and that is to overthrow the government and re-establish a congress. The articles fail to state any of this and no real examples defending fire arms came up during the time period because it happened during a streak of ongoing incidents involving inappropriate gun wielding and shootings. There are numerous reasons why there should never be a restriction on any sort of magazine limit or even general firearms in general, if you take away the guns from all of the innocent people only the bad people will have guns! This can be proven looking at England; which has an insane crime rate. Additionally if you look geographically the Russia has a significantly higher crime rate and violence rate then the United States. And when it comes to the continental US the places that are known for having more guns per household have far less (if any) crime whatsoever, you can almost think of it as being dumb enough to rob a gun store. but the farther you go from the Midwestern states (Baltimore being a tremendous example) the less the firepower that you are "allowed" to have in your house, the more the crime rate! The article states "No one is arguing that a high-capacity magazine ban would have prevented our colleague Gabrielle Giffords from being shot -- but it might have spared the victims who were struck by bullets 11 through 31". This is an ignorant statement because it holds no water. From professional experience I can say that firing an extended magazine hitting several targets with accuracy is far more difficult than a standard mag. The only real prevention you can apply is to monitor how well people train and what their intentions are and that is intrusive and none of anyone's business because if trained properly you can do almost equal damage with a standard magazine. The point being of all of this is if you allow them to strop one of your firearms or the accessories from your availability but allow them to have it you create an injustice and an unequal playing field. Last time I checked gun murders were a minor fraction of the cause of death that alcohol was; and I cant remember the last person that said they felt safe and protected because they had alcohol in the house.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-frank-lautenberg/post_1905_b_845590.html