Las Vegas shooting: Why is there no warning on Smart Traveller about travelling to the US?

It's been a week since a gunman opened fire on a crowd of people at a concert in Las Vegas, raining bullets on them from a distant hotel room, killing 58, injuring some 500 or so. It's a shocking event, something that has reverberated around the world.

In some ways, of course, it's even more shocking that it was not unexpected. Mass shootings happen so often in the US that many go unreported here in Australia. It's only the big ones that make the news these days.

And this is big. You'd expect some sort of travel warning, naturally. If there's a terrorist attack in Turkey, you're warned. If there's civil unrest in Myanmar, you're told to be careful. The Australian government's Smart Traveller website usually errs on the side of caution, scaring people when sometimes they don't really need to be scared. So obviously there will be a warning about travel to the USA.

And yet, there isn't. The official advice level on Smart Traveller, a week after the shooting, remains green. It's "Exercise normal safety precautions". That's as safe as it gets. It's like New Zealand.

The "latest advice" section mentions recovery efforts from Hurricane Maria in the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Nothing about a shooting. The summary of notable events in the US mostly focuses on hurricanes and travel restrictions that don't affect Australian passport holders.

Tucked towards the bottom of that summary list, in between entries on regulation Homeland Security stuff, and something about Tropical Storm Harvey in Texas, there's one short paragraph: "The United States has more violent crime than Australia, although it rarely involves tourists. Mass shootings continue to occur in public places. See 'Safety and Security'."

Cool. Wait, what? Mass shootings? In public places? Isn't that kind of a big deal? Isn't that something you'd want to emphasise a little higher up? Isn't that the kind of thing that would be setting off alarm bells the size of Big Ben if it was happening in Egypt or Colombia or somewhere like that?

Of course it would. And that doesn't mean that the US is any safer to the average tourist that those other countries. What it means is that Smart Traveller's warnings don't exist in a vacuum, they're influenced by politics, by the countries we see as our allies, and the countries we see as our enemies. Warnings are not created equal.

So you need to look at those warnings, particularly for the US, and add in your own information, your own conclusions. Is the US really a "normal safety precautions" country? Are people safe to visit a place that has regular mass shootings in public places?