Oh, I think it's icky too.

In fact since WWII we've been aware that only a small percentage of us can get past our killing bad instincts to shoot at other infantry in combat. We humans are really against killing each other.

But we're totally fine when the choices we make kill people offstage, or someone is willing to do the killing for us. Based on a 2015 tally, law enforcement kill four people a day -- most of those not resisting and not armed -- and the number has gone up with each year. And those are the ones that NGOs track via news, obits and coroner reports. Then we have precinct coroners who will fudge so that a police bullet was not a cause of death, erasing one. We estimate up to 75% of the incidents are not detected or reported, similar to unreported sexual assault cases.

And then there's elite deviance. It used to be called white collar crime but when Brian Thompson was doing it, it wasn't actually criminal, but perfectly legal according to the state. (He may have committed some crimes, but the ED included far more than that.)

Elite Deviance, when our ownership class engages in revenue-enhancing shenanigans such as private equity finance, kills more people, causes more destruction and costs more than all the petty crimes combined by multiple orders of magnitude.

That is to say, if we actually prosecuted our industrialists and capitalists, and (hypothetically) completely ignored every mugger, every serial killer, every shoplifter, and heck every corrupt police officer, we would still be saving lives by far. We might also reduce crimes of desperation, given precarity or scarcity informs most petty crime anyway.

But the society we live in does not grant personhood to everyone, and in fact most of us are beneath the interests of the owners and their corporate machines. And then there's the more obvious unpersoning, such as women with complex pregnancies, trans kids, non-whites and immigrants, or families of immigrants.

So it's not so much about whether killing is icky, but the narrow scope of specific cases in which killing is icky, because our society already tolerates an awful lot of it when we don't have to watch a specific incident unfold.