Actually, Americans love to be scared. You can sell stuff to scared people, and the American media knows this... so they feed Americans one scary story after another to build that fear up. Unfortunately for the rest of the world that scary stuff slops over the borders.
Watch the international news outlets for confirmation. In the US a smash-n-grab at an Apple store news item becomes a chance to scare Americans about crime and guns and the chances for being caught in the middle of a vicious breaking of glass. In the rest of the world it would be a page 29 item about the theft of 8 iPhones.
Boo!
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