In the old Catholic catechism, four sins were identified as “crying to heaven for vengeance” – murder, sodomy, defrauding workers of their wages, and oppression of the widow and orphan.

Outrage, rightly understood, is a moral thing. To be outraged at injustice, especially when it is tolerated or even pronounced “good,” is a good thing. It indicates a healthy moral sense.

Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s Education Secretary, once wrote a book called The Death of Outrage. To me, its lasting value is the title’s insight: our atrophied sense of outrage. We have become so “nonjudgmental” that even acts once unequivocally deemed barbaric — like murder of the innocent or the grooming of children — are now matters for “discussion” to find “common ground.”

I make these observations having read an article in the May 29 New York Times: “’General Hospital’ Actor Killed in Shooting in Los Angeles” (here). Let’s “deconstruct” the story. Johnny Wactor was a soap opera actor. He also apparently worked in a bar, presumably to make extra money. He left the bar at 3:30am last Saturday to walk to his car, around which three men were gathered. He apparently thought they were a towing crew. When he asked them what was up, one masked man turned and shot him. In other words, it was a case of cold-blooded murder.

Except you will not see the word murder in the story’s 324 words.

Wactor was “shot and killed.” What originally caught my attention was the sub-headline: “Johnnny Wactor was fatally shot when he interrupted a person who was stealing his vehicle’s catalytic converter.” How impolite! He “interrupted” their theft. And for that he was “killed in [a] shooting.” The closest we get to a moral judgment is the quotation of a social media posting that said Wactor’s life “was stolen from him.” Like his catalytic converter. Other postings echoed the usual American antiseptic bleaching of death: people were “heartbroken” to hear of his “untimely passing.”

Johnny Wactor might have had an “untimely passing” if he got in his car, a cable snapped, he lost control of his steering, and crashed on the way home. Johnny Wactor might have been “killed in a shooting” if he happened to be on a TV set with Alec Baldwin. Johnny Wactor was murdered. Why do we seem incapable of saying that?

The story concludes with an explanation, not of why we evaded  the “m-word” but why there has been a spike in catalytic converter theft. “They contain rare metals, like palladium and rhodium, that can be extracted and resold.” Given those metals’ prevalence in electric vehicle batteries, do we need to repeal “murder” laws? I foresee a spike in being “killed in a shooting” — and an attenuation of outrage.