I can’t imagine the inhumanity involved in raising a gun to a 97 year old woman and killing her in cold blood. In general, the victims of The Tree of Life Synagogue shooting were quite elderly.
Joyce Fienberg, 75
Richard Gottfried, 65
Rose Mallinger, 97
Jerry Rabinowitz, 66
Cecil Rosenthal, 59
David Rosenthal, 54
Bernice Simon, 84
Sylvan Simon, 86
Daniel Stein, 71
Melvin Wax, 88
Irving Younger, 69
On one level, their ages don’t matter. Murder is murder. But killing people in their eighties and nineties demonstrates just a little extra disregard for any actual threat, no matter how imagined it might have been. They were killed for who they were rather than for anything they might actually do.
This is how Nazis went about their business, too, killing the young, the old, the infirm, the most defenseless first, on the theory that that extermination was the primary point rather than any kind of self-defense.
I think James Fallows did an admirable job putting this in the correct context this morning.
