Death threats from strangers. Does anyone follow through?

Factual Questions
21

I don’t really think you can prevent such a thing. Unless you’re escorted by Secret Service or bunkered in your house behind armed guards, you are trivially killable. All a person has to do is

  1. Get a gun. Gun shows means that the needed requirement is a small quantity of cash
  2. Load the gun
  3. Find you out in public, or go knock on your door
  4. Shoot you dead

A single bodyguard won’t protect you - all the attacker has to do is bring a rifle and shoot the bodyguard first.

22

Interesting question. Depending on how you define “has gone on to be”

I could include:

But it seems clear your intent is to see if the threat itself should be worrisome - as obviously someone who plans to commit murder - probably doesn’t want to warn the victim of it. And in the anthrax case - also they died days later - in effect they were doomed when they read the threat.

I found this as well:

But it may be that the person was arrested simply for making the threats - I couldn’t find out if he had actually committed the murder.

23

1 year outside the parameters: Alan Berg, Denver talk radio host.

24

Apparently yes. There was a study recently published on this in a special issue of the journal “Personality and Individual Differences.” Here’s the abstract…

In two online studies (total N = 1215), respondents completed personality inventories and a survey of their Internet commenting styles. Overall, strong positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism.

25

Thanks, that’s interesting if extremely sad.

I also wonder if it correlates to age at all. I suspect that many of the gamergate threats came from young men who just felt safe mouthing off from behind a screen. It’s possible that’s lazy thinking on my part, but I don’t know.

26

Read Talkin’ Broadway’s Stalkin’ Broadway about Debbie Gibson’s stalker’s threats.