Picture this if you will. A kitchen window pane, spider-webbed with cracks spreading out from where a stray .45 calibre bullet has punched a hole through it early on a summer night.

A table directly in front of the window is empty now, but wet rings left by a bowl of ice cream attest to the fact that one of the house’s residents had been sitting there just minutes earlier having an after-dinner snack.

On other evenings at this time, the same room is often filled with children who flock to the unofficial neighbourhood “tuck shop” for frozen treats when the mercury is high and the air is still.

Now try to picture what could have happened if some of those youngsters had dropped by this home last Monday for an ice cream or a sherbet.

Death was cheated last week on Pembroke’s Rambling Lane when an armed criminal firing at a fleeing target managed to spray three houses in the congested neighbourhood with random gunfire.

This close-run thing could hardly have been much closer and it was only thanks to a combination of luck and providence that no one was fatally injured.

Yet our collective reaction to this near-deadly affair bordered on ambivalence. A few of the usual soothing platitudes were mouthed, but most of us shrugged off the whole business, donned our “What can you expect?” expressions and did our level best to forget it had ever happened.

Societies can certainly become inured to deadly violence to a degree that it can almost become accepted as a necessary evil. But no one ever expected Bermuda — a community that used to bill itself as “The Isles Of Rest” a few short years ago — to go this route so relatively quickly.

Bermuda, of course, experienced a lethal and completely unprecedented period of gang warfare just a few short years ago.

Expedited by the brisk underground trade in illegal firearms and fuelled by everything from feuds over drug turf to homicidal exercises in score-settling to pathetic romantic rivalries turned deadly, a spiral of shootings terrorised Bermuda and at one point threatened to rock the island’s social structure to its foundations.

The worst of the violence occurred even as the recession and its aftershocks were causing all manner of other convulsions throughout the Bermuda community. And there was a certain degree of cause-and-effect involved: after all, an imploding economy causes all manner of repercussions not necessarily gauged in terms of gross domestic product figures or employment statistics.

It is not entirely coincidental that a period of renewed economic growth — anaemic growth, for sure, but measurable growth nevertheless — has led to a sharp drop-off in gun crime.

Gunplay is certainly a much rarer occurrence in Bermuda than it was just three or four years ago. But we deceive ourselves if we think the guns ever fell completely silent. They didn’t. And we again seek the balm of false comfort if we think — as too many of us do — that the only casualties have been those who chose a criminal lifestyle; those who got what they deserved. In other words, those who fell victim to precisely the same rough justice they themselves would have been only too happy to mete out on the streets.

For the fact remains that no one is authorised to play judge, jury and executioner in a society based on the rule of law. Street justice can never be even tacitly accepted as a substitute for the criminal justice system, even for the worst who dwell among us. Whenever an individual is killed by one man or by a gang, in cold blood or in the heat of passion, in an angry burst of violence or in response to violence he might have visited upon others, the whole island is degraded, the whole basis of our society is eroded.

And the grim reality is there have, of course, been victims of mistaken identity among the injured and dead, along with wholly innocent bystanders who happened to be in entirely the wrong places at the wrong times. Innocent blood was very nearly shed last Monday night, although too many of us seem prepared to turn a wilfully blind eye to what happened on Rambling Lane.

But the reality is we simply cannot afford to tolerate deadly violence that ignores our common humanity, along with our claims to be a sophisticated, compassionate and law-abiding society.

We cannot, as Robert F. Kennedy warned shortly before he himself was felled by a killer’s bullet, ever afford to be unmindful of the fact that violence only begets further violence.

We cannot afford to forget that this short life can never be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

And we must never, ever succumb to a common desire to retreat from one another at the very times when we need to be pursuing common goals for the common good.

It is inarguably one of those times when large-calibre bullets start punching through the kitchen windows of random Bermuda homes.