Anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock the past few days is aware of the shooting rampage at VA Tech recently. Even if you don’t read the news, you know about it, because it’s plastered all over your friends’ xangas, blogs, and facebook notes, each entry dripping with honest sentiments of shock and horror.

Which leads me to provoke the question: are we really that naïve? First, let me say that I am not trying to trivialize what happened, though I may end up doing exactly that. Any way you look at it, the event was a tragedy.

I’m interested in the psychology of why people, myself included, find it so easy to unite under such circumstances as “shooting at Columbine” or “terrorist attacks subway station in NYC”—isolated incidents which have a direct effect on relatively few people—while turning a blind eye to daily, recurring atrocities that destroy hundreds or thousands of lives every day. Consider the following statistics:

Malaria kills 1-3 million people each year, making the most conservative casualty count roughly 3,000 people per day.

2.8 million people died of starvation in North Korea’s three-year famine. This was 1998. Today it’s arguably hardly any better.

Approximately 110 people in the U.S. commit suicide every day. Some people will excuse this by saying that it’s self-inflicted, when the truth is that there’s always something someone could have done to help.

In the most developed country in the world, the United States, there are 744,000 chronically homeless people (those with repeated episodes or who have been homeless for long periods), many of which ultimately die of starvation, diseases wrought by living in unsanitary conditions, or of sheer cold. Again, easily preventable should we provide them with a fraction of our disposable income.

And on and on and on it goes…

This begs two questions. First, why are some of us suddenly afraid of going to school because of a remote shooting in Virginia when statistically, you have a better chance of committing suicide or of asphyxiation by choking? Second, why does it so rattle us when news like this hits our radar? I’m talking about news that we can’t prevent without taking irrational measures, while we ignore the preventable atrocities that occur on a much larger scale around the world. Homicides happen every day, to people in a generally much closer vicinity to you than the students in VA. Are 32 homicides in one campus worse than 32 homicides distributed around the world? Is it about vicinity? Or about numbers?

Or maybe it’s just shocking to some of you that people can be so cruel. How can someone volunteer to discharge bullets and shrapnel into a live human being as a carpenter would fire a nail into furniture? For those of you who resonate with this, I must ask if you’ve ever read the newspaper (not counting the comics or sports sections). 50% of newspaper articles are about people dying. The front page is about the highly politicized ones (see top headline of the drudge report: “Campus Killer is native of S. Korea”… like that really has to do with anything), while the rest is about some homeless black guy in Idaho getting lynched. I’m not trying to be crude, but this is reality.

Moreover, how can someone be surprised that these happen when it’s in all of our natures to do the same thing under the right contexts? I’d rather not speak for anyone but myself, but I dare to say that I’m not the only one. I don’t think about taking a gun to anyone’s head, but I grew up in a loving family with nice dogs and have everything I could pretty much ever want.

When you or I examine our own human nature, can we honestly say that mankind is truly inherently good? Is the solution to life's problems really more of me? I hope not.

I hope I don’t come off as cynical or jaded. At least that’s not all I hope to come across as. After all, if my perception of the world ultimately fits reality, hence my not being surprised at such tragedies happening, it’s a pretty good start.