I think it's also that there is an historic precedent in the US that makes it perfectly acceptable to extrajudicially murder, especially Black people, and older people were very much in contact with that time. It's deeply embedded in the culture but it isn't so distant that some can't remember Jim Crow and Sunset towns, so it is not just historical but also a material reality and natural order to them.

Not to mention that humans can become more fearful existentially as they near death and conservative Whites are constantly waterboarded on horror fantasies of ultraviolent BLM radical antifas coming to kill them and their kids.