Death Wish

“‘But I see no signs that it’s interfered with his capacity to reason. Take, for example, the fact that all his victims—or all we know about, anyway—have been killed with the same gun. Now guns aren’t that difficult to obtain, unfortunately. He could easily have used a different murder weapon each time. He didn’t. Why? Because he wants us to know he’s out there. It’s a message to the city, a warning cry.’

“‘Like the come-and-get-me phone calls of that mad killer in San Francisco?’

“‘No. You mean the Zodiac killer. No, I would judge that one is truly psychotic. He’s probably pointed a loaded revolver at his own head and found he couldn’t pull the trigger; ever since, he’s gone around looking for someone who’ll do the job for him. No, our man here is not self-destructive—or to be more precise, that’s not his primary motivation. What he’s trying to do is to alert the rest of us to a danger he believes we aren’t sufficiently concerned with. He’s saying to us it’s wrong to throw up our hands and pretend nothing can be done about crime in the streets. He believes there is something we can do—and he believes he’s showing us what it is.

“‘It’s rather like the legend of the Emperor’s New Clothes, isn’t it. The legend has value only because it includes one naïve honest child who’s frank and uninhibited enough to a

“The smile, this time, is deprecatory. ‘I shouldn’t like to give the impression that I regard this man as a brave valiant savior holding back crime in the city like a boy with his finger in the dike. Too many people are begi

“‘In that co

“‘I’ve heard the same thing, even from some of my own colleagues. But I think that argument misses the point. This is a man who’s been deeply grieved and distressed by some intimate and violent experience. Now if you give a man a universe of pain to live in, he’ll do anything he can to get out. I would guess this man has already tried formal justice and found it wanting. He’s not concerned with bringing criminals to trial, he’s concerned with averting immediate dangers immediately—by removing the miscreants in the most positive and final way possible.’

“‘You think perhaps he was the victim of a crime and saw the criminal thrown out of court, something like that?’

“‘Quite possibly, yes. If you know our courts at all you must have seen occasions when a case the prosecution has spent months of agony to build is destroyed by one misguided witness who cuts through all their reasoned legal arguments simply because he doesn’t like the color of the prosecutor’s necktie or he had a sister who resembled the defendant’s mother. Our legal system is a shambles, we all know that. Punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial, and in our courts it is neither. I have a distinct feeling this man knows that firsthand; he’s probably been the victim of it.’

“For a psychiatrist Dr. Perrine seems to have a few unorthodox ideas. I put that to him: ‘Isn’t it more common for members of your profession to side with the defendants? Crime is a disease to be treated, and all that?’

“‘I don’t subscribe to those old shibboleths. Personally. I tend to believe the so-called humanitarian approaches have added greatly to the suffering of society as a whole. We have laws because we need to protect ourselves. To break those laws is to injure society. I long ago gave up believing in the therapeutic approach to crime, except in those cases where you’ve got a demonstrably curable case of aberrant behavior—certain sex offenses, for example, that are known to be curable by various drug treatments or psychotherapies. But we’ve gone much too far in the baby-bathwater direction. The function of punishment is not to reform the criminal, it’s to protect society by preventing and deterring certain types of misbehavior. The original idea behind putting offenders in jail was simply to get them off the streets and thereby prevent them from committing any more crimes during the period of their punishment. Capital punishment was the same in theory, except of course that its effect was permanent. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say this is our “vigilante’s” primary objective—to prevent these people from committing any more crimes. The primary goal of protecting society seems to be what many of us have forgotten in our rush to safeguard the rights of accused persons—and perhaps that’s what this man is trying to remind us of.’

“Dr. Perrine pushed his chair back and stood up. He spoke slowly again, choosing his words; the act of standing up was deliberate, I’m sure, intended to emphasize what he was going to say.

“‘This man has spent his life as a liberal of good conscience. I’m convinced of it. And now he’s reacting against many things he’s been taught—principal among those things being the idea of tolerance. He’s come to realize that tolerance isn’t always a virtue—tolerance of evil can be an evil itself. He feels he is at war, and as Edmund Burke put it, ‘Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.’ To this man his private war is the ultimate necessity. Otherwise he wouldn’t have started it—he’d have been too frightened. He’s a very frightened man.’

“‘I had the feeling he was just the opposite. You get the impression he has steel cables for nerves.’

“‘Quite the reverse. He’s terrified. It’s only that his rage is even greater than his fear.’

“‘Do you think his fear is real or imaginary?’

“‘Fear is always real. The question is whether it’s justified by the actual conditions. If it isn’t you have paranoia in some form.’

“‘Then he’s paranoid?’

“‘Most of us are, to some degree, certainly if we live in the cities. Usually we get along, we’re protected by our neurotic defenses. But sometimes those defenses fail and the ego collapses, and the unconscious terrors burst through into the conscious centers. I’m sure to this man it’s a vital and very personal fact, not just a dry statistic, that the heroin addicts in New York outnumber the police by a factor of several thousand to one.’

“‘Doctor, if you were asked to draw in words a composite psychological portrait of the vigilante, what would you say?’

“‘It’s difficult. So much depends on factors we don’t know—his upbringing, his experiences. But I think you can say this much. He’s careful, methodical, quite intelligent. Probably an educated man to some degree. Certainly he’s not terribly young. I’d say he was at least in his middle thirties and more likely well over forty.’

“‘What makes you think that?’

“‘Well, it’s rather analogous to our emotional reactions to space flights. Those of us in my generation are rather mystified by the whole thing, we don’t pretend to comprehend it on the emotional level even though we may understand the scientific basis for it. On the other hand children take it for granted—my younger daughter, for example, has never lived in an age without space flight and television. A little while ago she asked me quite seriously, “Daddy, when you used to listen to the radio, what did you look at?” Do you know I couldn’t remember? But the point is that the young people have grown up accustomed to shifting circumstances and unstable values. They may not like the things they see happening, they may even act violently to express their idealism, but at bottom they understand and accept the fact that these things do happen. When they act, they act in groups, because that’s the dominating ethos. You don’t find solitary teenagers going off into the backwoods to start organic farms; they do it in communes. You don’t find individuals protesting the war at the Pentagon—it’s always groups, however badly organized. Our youth have become group-oriented; perhaps it’s the influence of Marxism. But the rugged individualism, if you want to call it that, which this man stands for, is something our youth have rejected vehemently. And it’s also fairly clear that this man is bewildered and hurt by all the drastic things he sees around him—he doesn’t understand them, he can’t comprehend what’s happened, let alone accept it. He’s fighting back, but he’s doing it according to the traditions of his generation—not theirs.’