So what if kids drown? So long as they don't get shot.

Reading letters to the Editor all day, I feel like it's a pretty good barometer of the current trends in public opinion, or at least a pretty good indicator of what gets people all riled up.

Sometimes it's a little confusing though, because it seems like a lot of the issues that I think SHOULD get people all riled up don't, and vice versa. I've always had a fascination with psychology, or whatever you would call the study of why people do what they do, so I'd be pretty interested to find out what makes certain issues strike a nerve with people, while others just go essentially unnoticed.

For example, the federal government deficit. Every year, our government spends billions and billions of dollars that it doesn't have, fueling its own inefficiency and dragging down our economy. How many letters have come in about that? None.

But some politicians in northern Virginia propose a hiring center (essentially like a temp agency) for 'day laborers' (illegal immigrants), and our mailbox gets flooded by people saying that our lax immigration laws are shameful and undermine our national security, and just as many people saying that those people are bigots.

Also, roughly 500 children die every year by drowning in one of the 3.3 million backyard swimming pools in America. How many e-mails do you think we've gotten supporting 'pool control' or making pools illegal?

Whereas less than 300 children die from gun accidents every year, despite the fact that there are more than 200 million guns in America, making the odds that a child will die in a gun accident literally almost one in a million, or about 100 times LESS likely than drowning in a pool. But how many e-mails do you think we get advocating gun control or all out gun bans? Too many, in my opinion.

Our public school system is in shambles. We're churning out some of the dumbest kids, literally, in the world. Some schools in the DC area literally have geese making nests in the (non-functioning) toilets, and a shortage of lightbulbs. The budgeting of school funds is absolutely atrocious, so much so that some schools (like my mother's) have 8 office administrators, but too few teachers to prevent class sizes from approaching 30 students. How many people were outraged enough to write in about that? I don't know exactly, but it was in the single digits.

But then the President makes the statement that students should learn about Intelligent Design along with Evolution, and people start flooding our mailbox with claims that people who believe in Intelligent Design are a bunch of right-winged, fundamentalist, uneducated religious zealots, and that people who believe in evolution are a bunch of Godless, religion-hating, hell-bound Atheists.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about kids learning much of anything when they're chasing geese out of the bathroom and don't have enough lightbulbs to go around, but that's just me.

So what's the deal? Why do some people get so riled up about certain issues, but seem to be unconcerned with others? I don't claim to know, but I'm sure I could formulate a theory if I had enough time to sit down and think of one. Thoughts, anyone?