Individual aggression and a violent society

Abstract

The first was [a woman], 32, waiting for a bus on San Francisco's Geary Boulevard at 7:57 one evening last week. A man stepped up to her, shot her twice fatally in the chest, and ran back to a waiting dark-colored Cadillac. Ten minutes later and eight blocks away ⋯ a retired Coast Guardsman who had turned 69 that day was struck down by three bullets in the back and belly. At 9:15, near Market Street, octogenarian ⋯ died instantly from two bullets in his back. Three miles south, at 9:50, [a woman], 45, was cut down as she stood in the doorway of a laundromat. And ten blocks away, at 10:10, [another woman], 23, the mother of a four-month-old boy, was climbing the stairs to her new house when a man walked up and said amiably, “Hi, howya doin'?” [She] turned to reply, and a bullet burrowed through her body to her spine, possibly paralyzing her for life. (“Crime: Nothing Personal,'Newsweek February 11, 1974.)