The young assassins who think murder is protest

David Aaronovitch

- 

The cold-bloodedness is striking. A man supposedly motivated by his horror of the death of innocents shoots two young strangers in the back. As the woman tries to crawl away, he shoots again, emptying his gun. The wounded woman sits up; he reloads and shoots again. And so Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky died outside Washington DC’s Capital Jewish Museum. A man called Elias Rodriguez has been detained.

Horrible, but what's new? Americans kill each other with a terrible frequency. The US, for all its many virtues, has a violent past and a weapon-sodden present. Its murder rate is more than four times that of the UK, and up to 80% of those killings are carried out using firearms. Rodriguez had flown to Washington from his native Chicago, having declared that he was carrying a gun in his luggage.

It hasn't just been American presidents who have been assassinated. State politicians, campaigners, judges and fringe religious leaders have also been targeted, victims of grudges or of those whose voices guide them to committing righteous murders.

But there are trends in murder as there are in everything. Rodriguez was a man of the far left, who, just before the killings – under the heading “Escalate For Gaza, Bring

“The War Home” - allegedly wrote that murder would be a proper response to what he described as the genocidal state of Israel.