To be or not to be - or, killing the living and imprisoning the dead

Apparently, if one merely brings two news stories together, Minnesota school kid on mass-murder rampage with gun and the Schiavo issue (her name means slave in Italian, which she has become to the shenanigans of the BushBaby neoconservative playpen), in the United States life is only important when it's not really there: Unborn babies and vegetative brain-state adults have life so sacrosanct that Congress and the so-called President ram through special laws to protect it even against the will of the patient; but if you are just leading an ordinary life, those same instances ensure that maniacs get guns to mow you down dead during a normal day in school! Or they'll send emissaries to torture people to death in military prisons abroad. Whose death and whose life is important to whom in the US?
Time to get religion out of the considerations and consistency in!