The silent rooters.

By American standards, sad to say, Mr. John Salvi did not kill all that many people. If two dead, five wounded, had happened in South Central Los Angeles or East Harlem or Newark, in or near a shopping center, bus station, athletic supply store, amusement park, public swimming pool, or subway, the ration of space given over to the criminal episode would have been routine. The statistical news over the weekend was that New York City has benefited from a dramatic 10 per cent decrease in homicide--a mere 1,584 persons were killed in 1994. If you had given front-page attention to each of those, that comes to four stories per day, leaving scant room for Bosnia, North Korea, or Paula Jones.

Yet the New York Times, acclaimed as the model of sobriety, gave not just front-page attention to Salvi's shootings but the upper-right-hand spot on the front page reserved for the major news event of the preceding day. And not only on Day #1, but on Day #2. Why such attention? Because the background of the shooting was an abortion center. The planted axiom is that people who oppose abortion are ready to gun down those who perform abortions, administer to their operations, or patronize their facilities.

The following three days saw a frantic scurrying by the media for information about the killer. He had, by this time, been apprehended after shooting another few rounds of .22 calibre bullets into an abortion franchise in Virginia. The disappointment came when, searching into his background, it was learned that, yes, Mr. Salvi was opposed to abortion, but, no, there were no grounds for assuming he had been preoccupied with the cause. He appears to be someone who acted more or less on impulse, and it is probably not reckless to guess that when the time comes to try him for murder, his lawyer will plead insanity of some kind.

The next objective was to find someone who defended what Salvi had done. One paper made mention of persons who had defended his acts, though the dispatch gave the names of only two.

One has the feeling that it was a frustrating search, inasmuch as not one accredited anti-abortion organization has defended, let alone urged, violence in behalf of its cause. When Mr. Paul Hill was convicted of killing an abortionist and his bodyguard and was sentenced to death, there was no March on Washington to protest the verdict. A public demonstration to defend Mr. Salvi brought together a total of eight people. When Cardinal O'Connor was asked to express himself on anti-abortionists who want to approach the abattoirs with gun in hand, his simple statement was, "Let them kill me." A dramatic but eye-catching means of condemning utterly any such action.

Now, America being as America is, there are extremists in practically every political camp. There were certainly extremists fighting the abolition of Jim Crow, and one of them got so exercised on the subject, he killed Martin Luther King. There was plenty of heat on the other side, and one person who hungered for historical recognition, and no doubt fancied himself a champion of civil rights, decided to make his point by shooting Governor George Wallace. And then someone outraged by the pro-Israel policies of our government satisfied himself to make his point by assassinating Robert F. Kennedy. Five years earlier, someone protesting our anti-Castro policies thought to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

Now these shootings obviously got a great deal of publicity. But that publicity had to do with the eminence of the targets. The shootings were not implicitly reported as object lessons in the terrible lengths to which opposition to civil rights, or to a tough anti-Communist policy, or to Jim Crow, or to a pro-Israel policy could take people. The anti-Vietnam protestors killed and dynamited people every now and again, but their acts were not translated into condemnation of the anti-Vietnam movement. You can maintain with learned conviction that Lenin was a pure product of Bolshevism. But you don't get very far contending that Sirhan Sirhan is the flower of partisanship against Israel, or that James Earl Ray is the authentic child of opposition to the civil-rights acts.

So that Mr. Salvi is singular not in his devotion to life, but in the madness of his advocacy of it. Forgive us, Father, for we sin by saying it, but our guess is that more people who are opposed to abortion were agonized by what Salvi did than those Choicers who silently welcome the man who puts anti-abortion protest on the front-page, demonstrating the inherent violence of that position.