Conclusion

Violence, and the fear of violence, looms large in the public consciousness. The latest polling data indicate that violence is replacing health care reform as the number one issue on the public agenda, Rosenberg tells us. But how will these fears play out? Will more and more Americans arm themselves? Will they demand increasingly repressive law enforcement measures, in an effort to confine the violence to the already devastated combat zones of the inner city? Or will they see violence as one especially acute symptom of disease in the whole body politic and look for ways to disarm, defuse, and heal? How the fears play out will depend on how the issues are framed in the public mind.

What will it take to create a groundswell of support for public health initiatives against violence? We must continue to look for ways to make the mass media an effective part of the process of public deliberation. We also must find ways to counter the images currently dominating news and entertainment programming, images that portray violence as an endemic disease of the urban minority underclass. Most difficult yet, we must find counter-images that are equally believable but even more compelling to the public mind, and we must find ways to use the mass media to disseminate them. Fear has given us an opportunity to do something that will make a difference, Rosenberg points out, but it will be a limited window of opportunity.