Was this removed from the front page? So news about Prince dying from overdose is okay but 50+ people shot to death is not okay?
Users are flagging these stories. They flagged the Prince stories too. This is all in keeping with the HN guidelines:
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The exceptions, of course, would be stories that also gratify intellectual curiosity. That's sadly not the case here.