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What you're calling 'the constant drumbeat of urban violence' is just the normal stochastic process of people who know and interact with each other sometimes being violent towards each other (plus a semantic fence drawn around a part of that phenomenon for rhetorical reasons).
We can talk about whether those rates are too high or too low, and what policies could change that number, sure.
But it's not really newsworthy because it's mostly normal stuff that happens everywhere (at different rates) in one form or another. And people know how it works, what their risks are like and where teh danger comes from, how to avoid it, etc..
Incidents like this are newsworthy because they're unusual, unexpected, spectacular, and can happen out of nowhere to just about anyone simply going about their day.
I guess that's my point.
These mass shootings are not newsworthy. They are neither high impact (heart disease / urban violence). Nor are they novel (9-11 / space shuttle blowing up).
Imagine if every time a person was shot in South Chicago we made a national news story out of it and decried the left-wing politicians in Chicago who enable this violence. That's what's happening with these mass shootings. It's mostly political noise.
I dunno, I would agree that they're blown out of proportion, but I'd also argue they're at least somewhat newsworthy.
Again, it's really really salient to me that I can control my diet and exercise to avoid heart disease and I can not associate with mentally unstable people with guns and not drive drunk/always drive defensively and etc. to protect myself from a lot of known risks that kill a lot more people than this every year. Generally speaking, anything where there's clear and well-known methods I can look up to limit my risk, I fee may be very important, but not newsworthy.
Whereas things that just kill you out of the blue for no reasons as you're going about your day, or especially that kill a lot of people at once, feel newsworthy to me as an unexplored risk that I don't have much control over mitigating for myself. It feels to me like that makes it more of a topic of public conversation and public policy because I can't reasonably take personal responsibility to avoid it.
You probably just have different intuitions about what makes something newsworthy, which is totally fine. I'm just saying how it feels to me, I don't know how generalizable it is.
I don't think "I can't control this, but I can control those things" actually works here.
You can not drive drunk and always drive defensively, but you can't always stop the drunk person blasting through the red light from T-boning you unless you stay off the roads altogether. You may say you can control your diet and exercise, but how well do you, and what do the actuarial tables say about your actual risk of heart attack?
If you want to reduce your chance of being killed by a spree killer, it's not like there's nothing you can do. You can carry a firearm and train with it. You can avoid "gun free zones" that can't actually enforce their self identification. You can come up with plans for escape/counter ambush in case of a spree shooting. You can wear body armor, and avoid the kinds of large gatherings where these things happen. There's a lot you could do, it's just not always convenient to reduce risk, and you can never reduce risk to exactly zero.
Your theory would make sense if it were concealed carriers who were freaking out about spree shooting, having already taken steps to mitigate risk and being in relatively less control of their remaining risk. What I tend to find though is that it's people who are opposed to concealed carry who tend to be more concerned about spree shootings, and that points more to "don't want to have to consider doing the things necessary in order to mitigate this risk" as the actual driver of this concern.
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