Life provides pauses to consider right and wrong.

The news of the day can do the same. We should not ignore these.

Thus, we ponder our own front pages, which on some days reflect our immediate world’s violence — we mean Greater Port Arthur’s — as close as the nearest fallen victim, as stark as the bold headline.

We mean the death of Ronald Lee Livings Jr., 27, slain in a gun battle, murdered by gunshots to the body, outside a Beaumont nightclub. A Port Arthur man was arrested for the crime.

We mean Joseph Da’Mal “Lil-Joe” Lindley, 28, killed by a gunshot wound to the head, left to die on a Port Arthur sidewalk. A local man has been arrested.

Those victims, both in their 20s, met on our front page Thursday. Both men, in what should have been their lives’ prime years, lived shortened lives instead.

We mean five homicides in Port Arthur in 2017, and seven already in 2018. Did any of these have to happen?

Criminal cases involving both men must play out in courtrooms. Every defendant — one case resulted in an indictment this week, another in a case cleared by arrest — deserves a fair trial and his jury’s measured judgment. That’s how it should be with all homicides.

What we’d like to see is fewer homicides. What we’d like to see is more reflection, more pause, in our society. We’re not talking about gun control, which applies to the masses. We’re talking about self-control, which applies to the individual.

Fifty years back this week, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. died by gunshot, an anniversary that ought to cause us all to reflect not on his death but on his life, not on his end but on his work. King spent his too-short life seeking social change. But a thoughtful man of boundless faith, he also considered the role of the individual. Reading King might startle some social and liberal conservatives both, who might find in him a kindred spirit for personal responsibility.

In his sermon, “Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions,” dated first to 1953, King seemed to lament that the word “sin” had been “gradually eliminated from the modern vocabulary,” replaced by psychology’s buzzwords.

He posits the lives of great people born to unfortunate circumstances — Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Abraham Lincoln, FDR— who rose past their misfortunes to live great lives. People, King concludes, hold the power of their “personal response” to their heredity and social conditions. They can choose better. They can do better.

That holds true for those involved in all the homicides this community has faced. It held true for King’s assassin.

It holds true for us, no matter our circumstances, no matter the news of the day.