Withholding my own opinion, I think this is a very common sentiment in the US. Among other things, this is used to justify the lack of action on inmate-on-inmate violence in prisons. More generally, you commonly find people cheering the violent deaths of anyone deemed a terrorist by the government. I don't think this is restricted to the US.

Separately, I don't think 'agarden' is intends to make any normative statement about the correct attitude. Rather, he's pointing out that "innocent" victims tend to receive greater sympathy. If there is a bank robbery in which 4 hostages are killed, there will be greater outcry than a bank robbery in which the 4 perpetrators are killed.

This doesn't mean necessarily that people don't care if the criminals are killed, but does mean that they care less than if non-criminals are killed. Do you doubt this?

I don't doubt it, but it's still hard for me to hear that other people in the same country just aren't bothered by thousands of preventable[1] deaths.

[1] (Not a gun control argument.)

1) Let's say the article was about people who fell to their death because there was no fence at the top of the Grand Canyon. Let's further suppose that this was a pattern and it has been happening with increasing frequency of late, but it is still rare because the random gusts of wind that push people over the edge are rare, and further that the people falling had no idea that it was a risk posed by touring the Grand Canyon. And then you posted that in fact 294 people fell to their deaths every year but that number includes all the people who were out climbing mountains for sport. That number might be horrific, but the mountain climbers understood the risk and chose to take it. The tourists at the Grand Canyon thought that what they were doing was safe.

2) The solution for the one problem likely has nothing to do with the solution for the other. If many of those 294 deaths are because of gang violence or criminal activity, magically removing all guns might reduce that number, but it probably wouldn't reduce it much. Someone who is out just to shoot up as many people as possible may well not try to kill anyone if he can't get a hold of a gun. But someone who needs Guido dead so that he can't rat him out, he is just going to move to the next best weapon for the job. A crossbow, or a knife, or a poison dart, or a baseball bat, or a rock, or something.

>>The shootings that disturb us so -- school shootings and the like -- do not disturb because there are four or more people killed, but because those people had nothing to do with anything.

Which I actually agree with. People have always (and probably always will) kill each other for particular reasons: money, personal hatred, revenge, whatever. But a targeted killing of a particular person or people is far different than indiscriminately killing whatever random people happen to be in some random place at a random time. The former is something you might see coming and perhaps avoid. The latter is unpredictable, unavoidable and therefore more frightening.