So which example of human carnage most deserved an editorial board’s focus this day?

Was it the antisemitic shooting incident at Bondi Beach in Australia, where a father-and-son team of assassins opened fire on what was supposed to be a fun celebration of the beginning of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah? There, at least 15 people died and another dozen or more were critically injured. Rabbis, kids, the elderly; it did not seem to matter to the killers as long as they were murdering Australian Jews. En masse.

Was it the Saturday shooting in a classroom at Brown University that terrorized undergraduate students and resulted in the death of two of them and the wounding of at least nine more?

Was it the murderous incident at the home of the great Hollywood movie director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, killings in connection with which their son, Nick — a man who has struggled with addiction but also had made a healing movie with his dad — has been arrested?

Somewhere in the middle of all of that parsing of relative significance, all of that debating about the number of dead, the proximity to our readers’ homes and its relevance to our fears, the extent to which it was reflective of a broader issue, we threw up our hands at how little humans have progressed amid all of the vaunted technological miracles that surround us, how we still use violence to settle our political disputes or grievances or psychological states of being.

Since the way we analyze these incidents of violence mostly conforms to our pre-existing agendas and opinions, you easily could find whatever pallid justification you preferred.

In Australia, a country that disarmed itself at the end of the 20th century after its population reacted in horror to a prior incident, there was a reminder that the wrong people still can find a way to get their hands on a weapon unless the ban is absolute.

For those who oppose gun control, there was ample evidence that a society without many guns, even in the hands of police officers, finds it harder to immediately end such an attack, resulting in yet more dead. For those who want weapons banned, there was mostly just sorrow at these consequences. We could at least be glad they did not have automatic weapons.

At Brown, as we write, the shooter remains at large and legitimate questions are being asked about how and why he got away, why a classroom building apparently was so unwatched by cameras or guards, what that university community should now be doing, how a campus should be dealing with an evil person evidently still in its midst.

And in Brentwood, there appeared to be yet another agonizing lesson about the dangers of addiction to fentanyl, about how a chemical substance and the need for it can undermine love of your parents or make a mild-mannered person turn to the most gruesome means of attack, one by a hand-held weapon. When an artist is involved in such an incident, and Reiner was a great American artist, one’s mind often turns to the disparity between the pleasures afforded to others by their work, as in this case, and the apparent realities of life at home. One never knows.

We don’t know as much as we think about the why of any of this, but we can see the horrors of its impact on victims. And the word “see” has taken on a whole new dimension; a few clicks and the Bondi Beach massacre can be viewed on video. Shot by shot. Death by death.

Generally, our reaction to violence is dependent on some kind of proximity. But this weekend held something for everybody to fear. For anyone of Jewish faith, the idea that an outdoor family celebration in sunny Australia — or anywhere, really — could result in mass murder was a horrifying reminder of what happened at the Nova music festival in Israel in 2023 and that antisemitism rages on. For what other motivation could there have been at Bondi Beach?

For anyone with a kid away in college, the horrors at Brown gave parents nightmares about evil entering unprotected classrooms and life or death being determined by how easily, or not, someone could make it to the door. For students, there was a new sense of vulnerability even on a quiet campus where people were doing nothing more than reviewing material for a test.

And, of course, we all fear our kids falling prey to some kind of addiction and harming themselves, let alone another family or community member. This weekend, we all learned, again, that wealth and talent are no shields against such occurrences.

Editorials are supposed to draw inferences, make connections, advocate for change and have a point. Certainly, any reasonable person would wish that greater security, at Bondi Beach, at Brown, inside the Reiner home, could have stopped these attacks.

Most of us are caught between not wanting to be cowed by these terrorizing threats and being responsive to these clear and present dangers. We have no solution to that dilemma.

We will add this, though. For whatever reason, our society has lost its sensitivity to death. Whether it was President Donald Trump’s odious trolling of Reiner, a man he regarded as his political enemy but who now lays dead, or the anti-Israeli protester showing up as Australian Jews, who had no role in Gaza and live far from the Middle East, tried to mourn their dead, we saw people not just continue the hate in death but actually use it as a way to get attention for themselves.

Even given Trump’s history of relentless personal attacks, his remarks Monday were still enough to shock most of us in their sheer cruelty, coming from someone duly elected to be the leader of this great nation. We condemn them in the strongest possible terms, as we do the violence that seemed to explode across the planet just as the season of peace and goodwill was getting underway.

___

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.