Word: commit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...money and munitions. For colonial officials in London and New Delhi, this was no minor uprising of petty bandits. Intelligence estimates at the time counted 400,000 fighting men among the various Pashtun tribes, at least half of them armed with modern rifles. The insurgency forced the British to commit as many as 40,000 troops to the frontier, and, as World War II raged, to station a permanent garrison there even as the Japanese advanced steadily into Burma...
...stop taking drugs (although not alcohol), and signing a written pledge to submit to drug testing, she received a clearance to handle some of America's most sensitive secrets. Despite the pledge, follow-up drug tests were "never performed," a government document says, even as Quintana proceeded to commit multiple security violations with little supervision from the lab's security administrators...
...killings in the U.S. involving five or more victims - one generally accepted definition of a mass killing - represented less than 1% of all homicides 25 years ago, and still does today. Among kids, the overall violence figures are actually plummeting, with the number of children under 17 who commit murder falling 65% between 1993 and 2004. Mass killing, says Diane Follingstad, a professor of clinical and forensic psychology at the University of South Carolina, "is a low baserate thing. It just does not happen very often...
...When it does happen, the people likeliest to commit the crime fall into a drearily predictable group. They're 95% male, and 98% are black or white - not a big surprise since more than 87% of the population is made up of those two races. Cho, a native of South Korea, is a rare exception. If the killers' profiles are all more or less the same, however, their crimes aren't. The best known - or at least most lurid - of the mass killers are the Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Dahmers, the serial murderers whose crimes often play out over decades...
...However long it takes the killing to play out, when the crime is finally over, the shooter almost never expects to survive. Indeed, he typically doesn't want to. Achieving the state of nihilistic certainty that's necessary to commit the killings is one thing; crossing back to the world of the living afterward may be well-nigh impossible. "They are both homicidal and suicidal," says Pollack. "After the attack they are simply waiting for the next step, which they assume is the police shooting them." Most killers don't wait even that long, taking their own lives before whatever...