Given you lived there for years, like how do you do that, staying there for so long? I'd avoid a place like that if I even thought stuff like that was going on there in the first place, but if I ever ended up in a place like that anyway, one instance of that happening would make me leave and move away from there immediately, anything is better than experiencing stuff like that even once, even less twice or more.
There lives a ton of people in New Orleans, I'm guessing most of them are also as jaded/used to it as you? It's really hard for me to comprehend how so many people just get used to such constant needless violence around them, it sounds like a war zone to me, and people just... go to work and live a generally happy life while that just happens often? It's so foreign to me, and you write so casually about it, and people stay there?!