While we wait for information on the shooter, this is a fantastic read about a Secret Service study into assassins.
New Secret Service study on assassins challenges stereotypes of assassins; study, Preventing Assassination, examined all 83 people who attacked or tried to attack an American political figure or celebrity in last 50 years; agents and psychologists analyzed lives and actions of Lee Harvey Oswald...
www.nytimes.com
-The results, recently made available, challenge several stereotypes.
Fewer than half of the assassins showed symptoms of mental illness. Many shifted from one target to another, valuing the act more than the victim. Not one had communicated a direct threat to the target or to law-enforcement authorities.
The good news, the Secret Service says, is that assassins are recognizable, not by who they are, but by what they do. Though assassins fit no physical or psychological profile, most
share a pattern of behavior. Assassination is not a spontaneous event, but a trail of action that can lead to discovery.
''It is far more productive, and ultimately more accurate,'' the Secret Service concluded, ''to examine a chain of thinking that leads a person to see assassination as an acceptable or necessary action, and to attend to behaviors that may precede an attack, than to simply label assassins and assassination as 'irrational' or 'crazy.' ''
-What does seem clear is that, for almost all subjects, attacks or near-lethal approaches occurred after a
period of downward spiral in their lives,'' the Secret Service found.
The most
frequent motive that assassins gave for attacking a public figure was to achieve notoriety or fame. Only a few wanted political change or acted in a group. Other assassins wanted to avenge a perceived wrong, to end their pain by being imprisoned or hospitalized or killed, to save the country or the world, to achieve a special relationship with the target, or, rarely, to obey voices ordering them to attack.
Assassins seeking fame usually chose a prominent victim. Feelings about the target were irrelevant.
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'I would have voted for him if I hadn't been in jail charged with trying to kill him,'' one unidentified attacker told the researchers.
One-third of the assassins considered more than one target. Oswald, for example, fired a shot at a retired general less than a year before killing President Kennedy in 1963. And Mr. Hinckley stalked President Carter and the actress Jodie Foster before shooting President Reagan in 1981.
apnews.com
