Word: guns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art. Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation, death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive seat (plot device lifted from Elmore Leonard's novel Freaky Deaky), and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. As Riggs tells Murtaugh, "We're back! We're bad! You're black! I'm mad!" Mad to the max. Riggs may not know how to spell apartheid, but he knows whom he hates...
...Guns add a dimension of harsh finality to suicide attempts. Psychologists find that most people who attempt to kill themselves do not really wish to die. Many suicide methods, including drugs, carbon monoxide poisoning from car exhausts or simply swimming away from a shore, allow people to change their mind or to be discovered and rescued. According to some experts, for each successful suicide, there are at least 20 attempts. But one study has found that when people use a gun, the rate of death is 92%. Says Tulane University sociologist James Wright: "Everyone knows that...
Atlanta's Rhoda Berliner (see page 50) is an example of how the availability of guns can make a difference. She had been undergoing therapy for recurring depression. Despite a comfortable income, the 63-year-old divorcee was so afraid of poverty that she twice tried to kill herself with pills. Each time, her family discovered her soon enough to save her. But on Saturday morning, May 6, she found a swift and certain alternative. She went to a shopping center and bought a handgun. Since Berliner knew nothing about weapons, the salesclerk loaded the pistol for her. She took...
After the tragedy, her son Stephen Nodvin, a research ecologist in Knoxville, wrote a moving three-page plea to his Congressman. He conceded that his mother might have found another way to end her life, but said her depression would probably have been cured had a gun not been so easily available. He protested the casual way in which she was able to acquire the fatal weapon: "No waiting period was enforced, no mental or criminal checks were made, and the salesperson even loaded the bullets into the gun. Mom died that day because of the totally irresponsible attitude that...
Tawanah Jean Griggs, the young woman on the cover, was sitting on a sofa in her mother's home in Bartlesville, Okla., when her 20-year-old cousin fired a shotgun into her chest on May 1. At 17, she thus became one of hundreds of gun victims killed in the first week of May. They were shot accidentally or in an impulsive moment of anger, killed by friends, wives or husbands; they took their own lives or came to a violent end in a street quarrel or drug dispute. What they have in common is that they...