I think this is about where it’s important to remind people that the 24-hour news cycle is a relatively recent phenomenon. Many of us grew up in an era where the news played for an hour a couple times per day. One can hardly understate the impact this had on “the news”.

To keep it short and on-topic: The news used to almost exclusively feature big news stories because there wasn’t time to cover everything. Local news would have smaller, local interest stories. Individual crimes mostly made the news when they were especially noteworthy. Now, news stations need to find anything to fill an entire day. This is how we went from journalists reporting on big stories to commentators “reporting” on every little thing ad nauseum. This has led gun crimes to receive a lot more national attention than they would have previously.

Got some backing on that? What I really meant to address was mass shootings, but I’d look at evidence either way.