The answer to the OP's question is "not necessarily." Prior to more recent times, the reporting of news was not as immediate nor as thorough, so our perception of the violence of life, and death is distorted. For example, whole swathes of people died as a result of slavery by the Egyptians to build their pyramids, by the Romans when colonising and deriving their entertainment and religious persecution. This type of violence went on for centuries but those were still relatively small-scale affairs in themselves.
Fast forward a few centuries and, true, people were suppressed/oppressed and defeated but not necessarily exterminated just forced to work for new masters, e.g. during the Reconquest of Spain. In battles, the fighters of one army might be completely wiped out by the opposing army and victory be declared but it was just the army and maybe a few civilians but not all because the victors needed the local manpower to work for them.
The Charge of the Light Brigade was supposed to be a military disaster but there were only 156 killed or missing versus over twice as many horses being killed; almost all the human casualties were those actually involved in the fighting. Advance less than a hundred years and we get into WWI and civilian casualties start to get included and violence becomes more impersonal. It is estimated that roughly 10 million combatants died and roughly 20 million non-combatants plus several million refugees. 25 years later and it is WWII when the total death toll was in the order of 65-80 million, many more of whom were civilians killed while living peacefully in their own homes and not actively involved. War had come to the people instead of being something that happened on some foreign soil.
The changes in people that were brought about in wartime and in its aftermath were primarily caused by the calling up to fight of millions of people and secondarily by being bombed or shelled by the enemy who might be hundreds of miles away. It was no longer a matter of the the King's Champion fighting the other King's Champion or the country's standing army that was involved, but almost every family in the country was involved, not just during the actual hostilities but for some considerable time afterwards. People who had been plucked from their normal peacetime activities, were trained to kill, they had heightened levels of aggression - kill or be killed. Many, especially those who had been prisoners of war came away with a great deal of psychological injuries that made them more aggressive and would attack with no forewarning. When I started work (1957,), there was a guy who worked shift work, as did we, (this was on a War department base) and we used to spend a lot of time where he worked rather than spending time in our own complex (the nature of our work meant that could do so) in order to keep him company and help him to remain sane. He had spent many months in solitary confinement and suffered water torture amongst other atrocities at the hands on the North Koreans. In time he became more normal but, if we hadn't been supportive, there was no telling what might have happened. For many there was not that level of support and the violence that had been driven into them - kill or be killed - remained and, in general, this increased the level of violence in normal life.
In addition, an increased level of violence is down to movies and television. One sees this actor or that is killed or maimed this week, but next week, there he is again fighting somebody else - death or injury isn't permanent. For intelligent and rationally thinking people we are able to draw the line between fact and fiction, but there are many for whom such distinction is more difficult or impossible.