Word: murder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tumors & Goof balls. Whitman's bloody stand profoundly shocked a nation not yet recovered from the Chicago nurses' murders. One effect was to prompt a re-examination of U.S. arms laws and methods of handling suspected psychotics (see boxes). There was a spate of ideas, some hasty and ill conceived. Texas Governor John Connally, who broke off a Latin American tour and hurried home after the shootings, demanded legislation requiring that any individual freed on the ground of insanity in murder and kidnaping cases be institutionalized for life. New York's Senator Robert Kennedy proposed that persons acquitted...
...green-and-white one. With hundreds of curiosity seekers gawking and jostling in a rolling, palm-fringed cemetery in West Palm Beach, mother and son were buried with Catholic rites. Charlie had obviously been deranged, said the Whitmans' priest, and was not responsible for the sin of murder and therefore eligible for burial in hallowed ground...
...murder is horrifying, but the work of such as Charles Whitman or the Chicago nurse-killer produces an almost hysterical quality of shock and dread. Numbers of dead alone cannot entirely account for it. Nor can the unsettling plaint of Austin's police chief that "this kind of thing could have happened anywhere." What is ultimately so disturbing about the 23 lives so taken is that nearly all were snuffed out for no reason and at random. In almost every case, they were unnamed and unknown to their killers, the incidental and impersonal casualties of uncharted battlefields that exist only...
...extremes in a few individuals by the pressure to succeed and the social and economic mobility of American society. Perhaps, as many psychiatrists insist, the American mother's increasingly powerful position in the family has weakened the ego of American men, who are with rare exceptions responsible for mass murder in the U.S. All, or none, of this may be true?or, most likely, part of it. But the fact is that mass murder is by no means an exclusive American institution; it has been perpetrated in scores of countries down the ages, from Caligula's Rome to the Congo...
...psychotic does not murder often; neither, for that matter, does the professional thief. "Contrary to popular myth," says Wayne State University Psychiatry Professor Emanuel Tanay, "murder is not the crime of criminals, but that of law-abiding citizens." The great majority of the nation's 9,850 murders last year were family affairs, committed by outwardly ordinary people who, asserts Tanay, "practically never repeat this or any other crime again." When the psychotic whose trouble is deep enough does strike, the result is often wholesale slaughter...