According to the Chicago Sun-Times, there were 33 shootings in the city of Chicago this past weekend.

That’s actually an improvement over the previous weekend – the Memorial Day holiday weekend – when there were 64 shootings, seven of them fatal, The New York Times reported.

Yet somehow that bloodbath didn’t receive nearly as much attention as the shooting of a single gorilla at the Cincinnati zoo.

Perhaps that’s because, as the Times’ story story noted, "It is a level of violence that has become the terrifying norm, particularly in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. With far fewer residents, Chicago has more homicides than Los Angeles or New York."

Chicago Mayor Rahn Emanuel blamed "gang-on-gang violence and people with records of violence who are still on the streets."

The problem is getting worse. About 250 people have died in more than 1,500 shootings in the nation’s third-largest city so far this year. The number of shootings has increased about 72 percent over last year, according to the Chicago Tribune.

We favor tightening some of the nation’s gun laws for a variety of reasons, but are under no illusion that more restrictive laws will solve all or even most of the gun violence that plagues cities like Chicago and Detroit. We’ll go out on a limb and guess that many if not most of the guns used in those shootings were purchased not from reputable gun dealers, who might be required to conduct background checks and screen out felons, but from thugs on the street for whom laws don’t matter.

That’s not to say there aren’t possible solutions. But if the problems are cultural and rooted in ugly economic realities that promote lawlessness and despair and gangs, then the solutions must also be cultural and economic and offer residents of those cities at least a little hope.

We live in a culture that has become incredibly desensitized to something that happens far too frequently. And why not? Could anything really shock our sensibilities after the 2012 slaughter of tiny children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.? Gun violence has become ingrained in our culture as the mere cost of doing business among those segments of society that value gun freedom over all others.

Still, we are fortunate to live in a part of the world where shootings are still relatively infrequent. When a shooting happens in Nashua or Manchester or anywhere else in New Hampshire, it’s rare enough so that it’s still big news. Even Boston, despite its size, is still relatively civilized compared to Chicago or Detroit. The Boston Police Department reported on their website that between 10 a.m. last Friday and 10 a.m. Monday, there was one homicide, four nonfatal shootings and one nonfatal stabbing.

Next to those cities in the Midwest, our world looks like the Garden of Eden.

But when we look at Chicago and Detroit, we would do well to worry and wonder: Is that the normal that’s headed our way?