Oh yeah, I didn't mean to imply that feeling nothing is the goal. But I also think people over-empathize post crisis. It starts with people with no direct connection to the problem indulging in "if that was me" style thinking, and that results in overly traumatic empathy that causes them to shut down and move on. I suspect people like us, who indulge in the imagined recreations of others' tragic deaths, are somewhat unusual in our ability to take something positive away from it. Or perhaps it's how those stories are presented to us.

The other problem post-crisis with over-emotional thinking is that people tend to attack the 'other side'. But really, if you want to create laws or change, drawing people to your cause very effective (though you still have the problem of bought or intractable government officials.)

If America could pass gun reform laws or create effective measures to prevent school shootings, I would like to imagine it would not require those laws to be passed in the wake of a disaster; baseline support should be good enough. But as you said, they're up against a tough, well-financed opponent who has been doing this for a long time.

And as an aside, I think that economists, actuaries, sociologists, etc. could provide non-emotional justification for the value of human life. In an abstract sense, a person has no inherent value, but as a member (or even visitor) of a community, that value immediately becomes non-zero.