If someone is deliberately killed, when is it called assassination and when murder? What divides the two?
I’m sure a dictionary will differentiate the terms adequately, but I’m not even going to look it up. My reaction to the term “assassination” is that somebody famous, and most likely in public service or some high position, has been murdered. Otherwise, murder means somebody deliberately killed somebody else.
Chris Rock’s distinction is as good as any. He said that JFK, RFK and MLK were assassinated, but that Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were “just shot.”
I have always thought it had something to do with being paid to do the job. Someone pays you to kill someone you just became an assassin. You just kill someone, and while you may gain monetarily (from life insurance, or something), you just became a murderer.
Well we do say “paid assassin” but we also say “hired killer” so I’d not agree that being paid is the distinction.
assassination.
- To murder (a prominent person) by surprise attack, as for political reasons.
- To destroy or injure treacherously: assassinate a rival’s character.
I think of assasination has being carried out to achieve a political, cultural, or social result. A government official is assasinated to intimidate other people to quit the government, for example. I think of murder as being committed for personal reasons such as to get insurance money, or because the killer personally hates the victim.
That’s easy to disprove. None of the presidential assassins (successful or otherwise) were paid by anybody. Yet anyone who tries to kill a president is automatically an assassin.
If the killer is smoking hashish at the time, then he’s an assassin.
Hasn’t that etymology been debunked (maybe even on the SD)?
I actually don’t know, it’s the only etymology I’m familiar with. I’d like to see the debunking if it has been.
I searched and found this column:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/massassin.html
The column doesn’t debunk the etymology, but it admits that it’s not universally accepted:
So assassination is a subset of murder, involving a victim with enough fame/power/money/etc to potentially result in change of some sort?
Does the purpose of the killing have to be to bring about change? If I kill a random stranger in the grocery store, does if change from murder to assassination if that person is the dog catcher or the head of some government?
Dog catcher? No.
Head of some government? Most likely.
Assassination is a special case of murder. The importance of the victim has more to do with it than the issue of why the murderer acted and whether or not he/she was paid.
The notion of “change” brought on by the murder may factor in to its being deemed an assassination, but had the Pope been killed in the assassination attempt on him, it would have obviously brought in a new pope (a change) but the fame and exalted position of the Pope would be the more dominant issue.
All of this is my opinion and only hopefully a view shared by those who have more access to real legal definitions.
To me…
Killing of humans may or may not be permitted by society.
Murder is that killing of humans which is not permitted by society.
Assassination is killing of humans to achieve political result, as others have said upthread. Assassination is therefore almost always a subset of murder, unless you have a society that permits people to kill for political gain.
You have the case of Anna Lindh, who was killed while shopping by someone who was evidently mentally ill. I am not certain, but I don’t think her killer actually knew who she was. Personally, I would consider this to be a murder, rather than an assassination; but the Wiki article calls it an assassination.
Was the killing of John Lennon an assassination or a murder? Some would consider it an assassination, because of the prominence of the victim. On the other hand, one could argue that it was not, because the motivation was not political. (Of course, neither was John Hinkley’s motivation for shooting Ronald Reagan - although the victim was chosen because of his prominence.)
Chris Rock addresses this distinction in contextually accurate, but not very PC way.
Merriam-Webster has a somewhat different defintion than Dictionary.com:
This doesn’t even mention the prominence of the victim; instead what is considered important is the impersonal nature of the attack. According to this definition, a hired killer would qualify as an assassin, even if the victim was insignificant.
I’ve been debunking the hashish etymology for years now, I don’t remember if I posted it here, I might have. Short version: hashshâsh (habitué of hashish) had been used in colloquial Arabic for a daft or crazy person, like nowadays we would say “You trippin.” Cannabis is not known for provoking violence; quite the opposite, I would say. The top religious rank in the Nizari Isma‘ili community was called asas, the Arabic word for ‘foundation’ or ‘base’. Yes, they were the 11th-century al-Qa‘idah. There are two words for base in Arabic, and they’ve both been used by terrorists.
Anyway, my theory is that opponents of the Isma‘ilis mocked them by replacing the word asas with hashshash as a joke. It got repeated so many times that by the time Marco Polo heard it, he probably wasn’t aware it originated as a pun.
Incidentally, the word hashîsh in Arabic literally means ‘grass’. 
In Spanish we have a word that doesn’t seem to exist in English: ajusticiamiento, meaning “the making of justice”. It only applies to tyrants, and seems to excuse the murder for the common good. I like that word.
Interestingly, the normal word for murder in Spanish is asasinato, though homicidio is also used.
I’m not contradicting what you say, since that may be a connotation, but both my Spanish-English dictionaries give asasinato as the translation for “assassination” as well as for murder, and translate ajusticiamiento as the execution of a criminal.