On Being Surrounded by Murder

 In considering the banality of killing, I wonder if the constant murders all around the country have caused an insensitivity to life. Jewish law demands the opposite: that we be conscious even of how we take an animal's life for food, because callousness towards any sentient being potentially leads to callousness to all life. But, as Timothy Kudo points out in How We Learned To Kill, (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sunday/how-we-learned-to-kill.html?_r=0)  deciding who lives and who dies becomes very confusing because of an innate sense of the supreme importance of life. We recoil at being accountable for the unjust death of another human being. I surmise that for many people this leads to an emotional withdrawal from the very complicated question of whether, as a result of the many murders surrounding us and listed daily in the news, we become increasingly insensitive to the pain of those who suffer from the results of murder. Do we feel, as a society and as individuals, responsible for the deaths that are the inevitable consequence of our permissive gun laws? If the answer is yes, then what is the emotional result on us of our partial culpability for those deaths? Clearly, we are not doing everything necessary or possible to reduce death by guns. Is that, in part, the result of confusion both about being surrounded by death and our answerability for the sacred nature of life?