3. Criminal Negligence
Everyone loves to bring up the fact that Batman "killed" during his first year in the comics -- as though because Batman occasionally killed during his first appearances,
before he has acquired an origin story or most of his recognizable character traits or even managed to become anything much more than a visually striking Shadow rip off, it justifies Batman killing in any version of the character from that point onward. Historical context is also important to consider here: in the late '30s/early '40s, when these stories were first being written, comic book morality was a lot simpler -- heroes were good, villains were bad, and any crook who bit the dust absolutely, positively, 100% deserved that death, because they were unrepentant slime. Even then, Batman's intentionally lethal activities really weren't all that numerous:
he melted down two silver bullets to kill a pair of vampires, he machine gunned a truck carrying Hugo Strange's "monster men" with the admonition "
Much as I hate to take a human life, I'm afraid this time it's necessary!"...we were a long ways from the "one rule" Batman of 1940 onward, but still, it's not like Batman was Elliot Ness or Dick Tracy, gleefully firing tommy guns at bolting crooks. No, in his early years, it's not so much that Batman was openly homicidal as that he was...a little negligent about the safety of criminals he tangles with. Batman pretty much just let his first "super villain", Dr. Death, go up in a terrible fire with his laboratory (although Death ultimately turned out
not to be dead...), and if we go back to Batman's first appearance, in The Case of the Chemical Syndicate, there's an infamous moment where Batman punches a crook, and the villain stumbles backwards and falls to his death into a vat of acid (pictured above). What's unsettling isn't so much the death itself -- I'm not sure we can blame Batman for uppercutting a proven murderer holding a firearm, and the dude dies thanks to a trip over a railing that leads him to fall in a vat of goo, which is almost a gag out of a Looney Tunes cartoon -- as Batman's reaction to it. "A fitting end for his kind!" he rasps to the man he's just saved; Batman may not have had outright murderous intent in his early appearances, but if a few crooks got flattened as collateral damage? Eh -- part of the job. The Batman of later years had no love for criminals, but as a result of the murder of his parents, he would come to see all human life as precious, and the waste of it tragic; this early Batman was a much more shadowy, ambiguous figure, with a similarly ambiguous morality to boot. And while we're on the subject of an early years Batman dispensing lethal justice...