Have you ever heard of the shark attack phenomenon?
Every summer, people end up afraid to swim in the ocean because there are sharks. They are afraid because they see in the media that there are attacks. The issue is, you are far more likely to be killed in a car accident heading to the beach than by a shark at the beach. Yet most people don't fear the car, they fear the shark. The reason this happens is while pretty much every shark attack is reported in the media, only really big car accidents are reported. This leads people to believe shark attacks are a much bigger problem than they are. The opposite also happens, in that people don't think car accidents are a huge problem when they are. Car accidents are getting more frequent and deadlier.
Since the media runs on views, they run more violent content since it gets the views. You probably won't stay up and watch the 11:00 pm news if it was about dogs needing to be adopted, but a story about a guy torturing a dog, that gets aired because that makes people angry enough to stay up and watch. In reality, violent crime is down massively, but the reporting on it is up massively. This leads to increased fear, which in turn causes moral panic. Moral panic always results in reductions in freedom.
Politicians on all sides love a moral panic. They can enact rules to fix something that isn't broken and look like heroes. They love to take one instance of a thing and apply it as if it was the whole truth. Don't fall for that.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.