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Thanks to the information age, everyone can express their views with the touch of a button or three. Nothing requiring much effort, such as actually writing a letter and mailing it.
hmmmm....that's something I have to mull over quite a bit.
On one hand, a petition site like "We the People" could be a very hard brutally efficient way of shortcutting the letter writing process.
On the other hand, it lacks credibility.
The former is an aspect I never considered.
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In the dark and distant past, way before our current computer & cell phone age, I spoke at some length with some politicans and newspaper editors, and they were consistant about one thing. A written letter, delivered through the mail, carried the most weight. Because they knew for every letter writer, there were dozens to hundreds of people who felt the same way (no matter which way it was, or about what) that didn't bother to write.
Phone calls were also listened to, but were not given the same weight of opinion. 10 or 20 to 1 was the "value" of phone calls to written letters in those days.
Even today, an e-mail or a text, or an online petition does not impress them as much as a written letter, I have no idea what they consider the ratio today, but the fact is that even a huge seeming number of "hits" on a subject is only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the nation, and high electronic numbers on an issue today do not mean similar support for the same position the week after next.
This most recent mass murder is horrifying, but it is not new, not uniquely American, and not nearly as common as the media leads us to believe.