It's beyond the capacity of most people to be shocked by violence anymore. I once lived in a neighborhood where my grandfather built a house in 1915. Though the neighborhood was still charming, the area became violent in the 1990's, and you could hear gunfire most nights. In the day, it'd been a showbiz place with studio workers, and where Mary Pickford maintained a cottage with eight smallish bedrooms for intimate, private parties. The entire upstairs of that house, a Craftsman like ours, was composed of a ballroom with a lovely dance floor. We lived there for a period of time and, eventually, the shots blended into the neighborhood's ambience so that, instead of shock, it got to be a guessing game about how far away the noise was, and how many retorts were coming, followed by sirens and the noise of choppers, though not always. Sometimes, no one came, probably more often than not.