A shooter attacked a suburban elementary school, leaving 26 dead. A gunman terrorized a crowded night-club, leaving 50 dead. An attacker devastated a major city on their independence day, leaving 80 dead (at the time of writing).

These are three painfully large numbers of lost lives, in only three of the mass-murder tragedies that have occurred since 2012. These are three shattering statistics that have been obscured within the chaos of policy controversy and political debate. These are three sets of events that affected the lives of thousands, but have merely consumed the public eye for only the time being before the next tragedy.

“Oh, it’s a shame that you’re missing today! There’s going to be a party in Nice for Bastille Day -- it’s going to be a fun day,” said the beaming taxi driver to the family of American tourists, en route to the Nice Airport at 8:30 a.m. (GMT). The family prepared to head back home, disappointed to miss the celebration, on this beautiful day in Nice, France, as the high-spirited city prepared for a day of nationwide cheer.

University of Michigan student, Livia Seymour, and her family returned to their New Jersey home this evening, only to turn on the news and see the city in they had vacationed in earlier that morning was left in ruins. Seymour expresses the heartbreakingly unique connection she had to the attack from just visiting the city only hours prior, as she ponders the immense connection family and friends of the 80+ victims and residents of the dynamic city being so much deeper and even more saddening.

“You see Pray For Nice hashtags or celebrities tweeting to spread awareness. You watch the news and read the articles and you truly feel bad, but you never feel much of a personal connection to it. After today, I realized that when something like this happens, you never really understand how many people are affected,” Seymour said.

The 80 deaths in Nice encompass the collapsing of spirits of 80 struggling families. The 80 deaths in Nice leave 80 sets of great friends desperately questioning why their loved one was taken. The 80 deaths in Nice deserve to be properly respected and remembered, rather than blurred with the death toll in the news headlines.

A great problem lies within the general public’s reaction to these tragedies -- the dry human reaction to tragic loss when consumed in large quantities leads to neglecting to individualize the humane aspects of the affected. With the spread and consumption of these stories, as the causes of attacks are uncovered and public reaction overflows with anger and surface-level confusion, we long for answers and we plead for justice. But, the number of casualties attached to mass killings seems to have exponentially increased with each story, while the lost lives remain as purely just a number. It is alarming how those statements, above, about past stories may not have triggered as extreme of a shock as rationally expected -- the frequency of these brutal killings have caused many of us to have become simply and wrongfully accustomed to mass-murder and terror.

Although each story may leave chills running down our arms and lumps in our stomachs, with the absurd normality we have shaken hands with over the past few years, these situations have become borderline normal to us. We often become wrapped up in the larger scale of the tragedies, as the delicacy and horror of each situation deserves a more intricate human reaction.

We must not forget that each victim and the affected friends and family members deserve utmost respect, as they do not deserve to be lost as a mere number in a list of casualties. Each tragedy deserves human sympathy and attention, and must be differentiated from the blurred lines of concrete policy and political debate. I encourage all to take a moment to really mourn those lost in Nice and in the rest, and to account for each taken life individually rather than blurring their unknown faces with a statistic.