Again, we're arguing about this RASH OF HOMICIDES which DOES NOT EXIST. Yes, WHEN someone decides to murder, they seem to murder more people, on average, than 20 years ago. But FEWER people are murdered than 20 years ago. It's indisputable. So what we're really crapping our pants about is the fact that the homicides that DO occur are more telegenic and "scary" than the homicides that occurred when we were kids. It's all style and no substance. We've been killing each other since God was a child, but now it's a National Crisis because...because what? Because it's televised? Because the victims are kids? How many little black kids caught one in the head because some • drug dealer opened fire on the home of some other • drug dealer? Were they any less innocent because Dad dealt drugs? Every murder of anyone, for any reason, is horrific. And any murder of a child is, somehow, I agree, even worse. But the way it's being presented is pure Theatre. There must be a Hero(ine), there must be a Story. There's no screwing Story that informs us about Ourselves and gives us a transcendent sense of the Human Condition. This isn't a movie. There's no script, there's no easy denoument in which we discover who's Bad and why. It's just a horrible thing that happened.
Like horrible things have been happening since our ancestors waddled out of the primordeal ooze. Six million Jews. 20 million serfs and "counter-revolutionaries" under Stalin. Two million Cambodians under Pol Pot. A million Armenians by the Turks. Plenty of freaking Turks by the Armenians and Kurds.
But our reaction to this is to put MORE power in to the hands of the State, which, like other States has as its primary motivation the care and feeding of...itself. Always and forever itself, this cancer. And you want more? Guess you don't hate murder all that much.