Is it normal to wonder why people care about only certain tragedies?

People are inconsistent in whose deaths they care about. The Aurora shooting and the attacks by Anders Behring Breivik are two examples of this. Those incidents killed 12 and 77 people respectively and sent many communities into mourning. I even heard someone call the latter "the worst tragedy in Europe since the Holocaust," which, though obviously an extremely inappropriate comparison, would probably get a few nods. But far more people than that die all the time. There are approximately 150,000 deaths every day, so if death is really so tragic to them why aren't people mourning constantly? They care about incidents that kill fewer people than who die in a minute, but don't have nearly as much interest in children who starve in poor countries or Islamist governments that kill their own people. Now, I can see a few reasons for this. I think a major one is that the incidents people care about take place in America and Europe, which they see as more important than the rest of the world because of their white majority population. That's why a comparatively minor incident in America receives nonstop coverage for weeks on end, but a far more deadly bombing in an Arab country will only get mentioned once and forgotten, or only mentioned in news tickers. If someone can come up with a plausible reason for this discrepancy that isn't based at least partially on racism, I'd like to hear it. Another element, from what I can tell, is political motivation in instilling fear of guns. Let's take Breivik's attacks as an example. They occurred in two phases, a bombing and a shooting. The bombing occurred at a government quarter and had 217 total casualties. The shooting occurred at a summer camp and caused 179 total casualties. While the shooting had more deaths than the bombing, the bombing was targeted at government officials, specifically Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, and therefore had more potential for significant damage to Norway itself. But the bombing was only mentioned in passing in many media sources while the shooting was focused on. Why is this? Simple, there's no lobbying for the banning of bombs that's in need of public support, but for some parties there's plenty of motivation to drive home the "guns are bad" point at every opportunity. Ever notice how, whenever a news caster says the word gun, they'll put a strong emphasis on that word even when it's not conducive to good grammatical flow? They want to make sure you pick up on it, because over a period of time they program you to have a negative reaction to it. Unlike subliminal messages and other conspiracy theory nonsense, this is a studied and well-established part of the psychology of communication (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_%28social_sciences%29). That would explain why many attacks receive no significant mainstream coverage. The media only covers what's in its interests to cover. By doing so, they control the people, who choose to go along with it.

I discussed this once before elsewhere and was accused of politicizing tragedy. But that's the opposite of what I'm doing. I'm showing how the media is politicizing tragedy and manipulating people into going along with it. Many people claim they're smart enough to avoid it and that some people might be swayed but they're smarter than that. I find that those people are usually the most easily deceived of all. The reason why is, by defiantly saying they're above it all, they're taking an emotional stance on the issue of deceptive news, and bypassing rational thinking to control emotions is exactly what the media does. The reason people are controlled and inconsistent like this is because they think with their hearts, not their heads. If you had an emotional reaction to the Aurora shooting but don't bat an eye at the atrocities that occur outside the Western world every day, you have no right to call yourself anything more than just another media-controlled tool. And don't lie to yourself, that's most of you.