Possible in some things. They do make a special not on HIV in the paper that should not be ignored.
On guns, we have more than we had before, so the liberalization (old school meaning) of gun laws has not increased any gun related violence. On the other hand, we spend a lot on educating the public on proper eating. I get the feeling our approach isn't correct given the changes, but I would have to look up some study data.
I don't deny for a moment that Americans (and indeed, people everywhere) worry about the wrong things. We are biased in a number of ways to pay more attention to risks based more on the availability heuristic than any realistic assessment of what is more likely to happen.
We need to be careful: maybe things that are going down are going down because of how much time we have spent looking at them.