Word: subway
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Wilson said that cases similar to the subway shooting occur constantly around the country. Indeed, in Beverly Hills on New Year's Eve, an 81-year-old retired jewelry merchant shot and killed a 26-year-old mugger with an illegal handgun. The mugger's father said that he would have fired too, and the deputy district attorney announced, "We're not going to put an 81-year-old man in jail." The incident passed with little public attention...
Rarely, apart from assassinations of the famous, has the act of a single anonymous person caused such a stir. Mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz gets on a New York City subway. Four young toughs surround him, asking first for a match, next a cigarette, then $5. He pulls a gun, shoots them all, two in the back. He runs away, then nine days later turns himself in. The town goes wild for him. Dubbed the subway vigilante, he is the talk, the toast, of every radio call-in show from Miami to San Diego. The outpouring of popular support becomes...
...other object of rage is the New York subway, and the authorities for permitting it to deteriorate to its current sinister, menacing state. The New York subway is a place where the rules nominally apply, but only nominally. The problem is more than the breakdown of law. It is the breakdown of order. "The absolute amount of serious subway crime is small--38 reported felonies per day," editorializes the New York Times. "The larger problem" is "graffiti, vandalism, harassing passengers for handouts. The pervasiveness of that mischief generates fear that a system millions must ride has slipped out of control...
...system--but it retains a curiously surreal quality: the characters, hero and villains alike, are all abstract, marquee characters. Indeed, the whole Goetz phenomenon is life gone to the movies. The tabloids call the hero the Death Wish vigilante. The bad guys are out of A Clockwork Orange. The subway set is borrowed from Escape from New York. And now the audience picks up the chant from Network, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more...
Like all romantic leads, the subway avenger looked better on paper. Until the real one stood up at a New Hampshire police station and confessed, we could imagine him a star. Charles Bronson. Gary Cooper as Wyatt Earp. Better still, Cooper in High Noon, citizen-lawman, doing his duty, Grace Kelly at his side...