New Orleans undoubtedly dropped into double-down funk when the Saints on Saturday met post-season termination at the hands of the Forty Niners less than a week after LSU found itself embarrassed at the hands of Alabama.

That done, maybe the city will now have one less amusement to distract its citizens from a 2011 murder rate that grew the city to the dubious distinction of “murder capital” and promises no letup during 2012. Last week during a 24-hour period 18 people were struck by gunfire. Five died.

In one recent incident, an 11-year-old boy was killed inside an apartment after he was struck by a bullet that had passed through the building’s exterior wall. The projectile then pierced the back of the boy’s head and knocked out his eye with its exit, his mother told the Times-Picayune. She also told the TP that she had rarely let him play outside, thinking that would be safer for him.

In another recent incident, a toddler was killed after she got caught by one in a spray of bullets that a gunman fired generally in the direction of his rival.

Have so many handguns with such devastating firepower ever before found their way into the hands of so many so willing to fire them with so indiscriminately?

Especially appalling incidents like those generate public reactions. Sometimes at the crime scene but more often at rallies afterwards, family members and their friends are joined by police brass, the mayor, preachers, community activists and others who call for an end to the violence. “Stop the murder,” screams a message from a billboard.

But those demonstrations have become so frequent as to have become predictable even as the outrage over each crime fades with increasing rapidity. It is a city with murder fatigue, even when it happens to the young and innocent.

So why choose to live part-time in a city plagued with such a record of violence?

Sadly, murder discriminates against black people in New Orleans and many other places. Most of the victims and shooters are African-Americans. Many of those rallies held after especially tragic shooting list a familiar litany of complaints: Failed education systems, failed families, failed churches and schools, police corruption, government indifference and more. All seem to be an outgrowth of a failed drug war that has been ongoing for decades with little results.

As long as government pursues a policy that keeps the price of contraband drugs high, there is enough profit to sustain the always deadly black market.

So what does all this going on in New Orleans have to do with Panola County? As these lines in this column were being composed a shooting broke out in broad daylight on Vance Street in Batesville. Witnesses reported hearing a fusillade of shots about noon. For the next several hours, officers chased suspects, rumors and leads as they tried to rein in not only the proper suspects but the rumor-spawned anxiety that multiplied in our midst.

Back of that anxiety is a common knowledge that guns are plentiful hereabouts as well and that they are increasingly likely to find their way into the hands of people who worry as little about indiscriminate shooting as people in New Orleans (or Memphis or Chicago, wherever).

The idea that those things just don’t happen here, not in our quiet little town, has worn itself out in an age of cyber communication and transportation.

And down in New Orleans, they’re never long for another amusement to divert the civic conscience from the violence that keeps so many of its citizens living in fear. Carnival Season has begun; Mardi Gras is February 21.