It's funny how small towns offer a sense of security, even if it isn't really warranted.
We moved to a small town about 15 years ago. It was right after a fairly brutal murder of a local teen. And it was just a few years after the murder of a local man by his roommate. That one didn't get as much coverage, but he murdered him with an ashtray in a fit of anger. Locals were still happy to tell us that no one locks their doors.
Since then, we've had two double murders, a SWAT situation where four neighboring police forces came to town to help local police kill the guy barricaded inside his home, and a sad story of a young man who went missing in December and was found murdered the next spring. There was also the time a local man randomly attacked two out-of-town women with a baseball bat and was stabbed with a screwdriver by a neighbor. And I feel like I'm forgetting one more.
Even after all of that, police had to call everyone in town and tell them to lock their damn doors after a rash of burglaries. The thieves were just walking around trying doors at random and being very successful.
Granted - my town is unlike the one in the article because it seems like the attacks in Nebraska were both random. That would be unnerving. What I do find funny (in the WTF sense) is that every time my town has another murder, double murder, or riot, the people seem to forget all the ones that came before. For a town of 3000 people our per capita murder rate must be pretty high, but everyone feels totally safe.