Word: pistols
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Patrick Purdy sprayed 100 or so bullets from a rapid-fire assault rifle into a crowd of children outside a Stockton, Calif., elementary school, killing five students and wounding 29 others and one teacher before dispatching himself with a pistol, he set off a national wave of horror. If tots playing innocently in a schoolyard at recess are no longer safe from heavily armed criminals and lunatics, who is? Many citizens concluded that no one is, and some on the West Coast resolved to take action. Their solution: to arm themselves for survival in a world seemingly gone...
...walked toward the school yard. At least 300 pupils, mostly kindergartners through third-graders, were enjoying their lunchtime recess. Impassively, Purdy squeezed the trigger of his rifle, then reloaded, raking the yard with at least 106 bullets. As children screamed in pain and fear, Purdy placed a 9-mm pistol to his head and killed himself. When the four- minute assault was over, five children, ages 6 to 9, were dead. One teacher and 29 pupils were wounded. Those killed were all Southeast Asians, from war-refugee groups that make up 71% of the school's enrollment...
...They are as different as water and fire," says a family friend. Seiji and Yoshiaki are the sons of the late Yasujiro Tsutsumi, a cantankerous millionaire who became speaker of the lower house of the Diet after making a fortune in railroads, hotels and department stores. Nicknamed "Pistol" for his buccaneering business methods, Yasujiro bought out impoverished aristocrats who could not pay inheritance taxes during the late '40s and early '50s, put up hotels on the newly acquired land and cockily called the hotel chain Prince. The 484-room Tokyo Prince, for example, is set on the former cemetery...
...another with gag lines rather than food, but get drenched with a bucket of green slime every time they utter the phrase "I don't know." The action on Kids' Court is only slightly more decorous. On one show a youngster stood accused of taking his brother's water pistol and hiding it in the oven, where it melted. To help re-create the crime, the TV defendant grabbed a replica of the gun and raced around the studio squirting the audience...
...alternating soothing words to an audience of pinstripes at the U.N. with tough talk to a pistol-packing, fatigues-clad troublemaker in Havana, Gorbachev is trying to demonstrate that his is a kinder, gentler U.S.S.R. that is now in the business of providing diplomatic solutions to the world's many military problems. However shaky its basis in fact, the Soviet campaign has been working. Gorbachev, says a senior U.S. diplomat at the U.N., "has single-handedly made the Soviet Union internationally respectable...