Nowadays, you just never know. Chances are the guy who assaults you in a parking lot won't be wearing gang colors and carrying an illegal handgun; it's more likely that he'll be in a Polo shirt and beat you to death with a golf club. "Hey, he scratched my Beemer!"

The person most likely to arrive at work armed to the teeth in a camo outfit might be sitting in the next cubicle, some mild-mannered church-going father-of-three who is having marital problems, wrestling with self-esteem issues, or dealing with some other lame excuse for shirking moral responsibilities.

The next body count that Katie Couric tearfully exploits might be attributed to a pimple-faced 14 year old who got picked on by an age-old hierarchy known as 'jocks.' (These days, assault weapons have replaced water balloons as a response to a common rite of passage.)

The problem is that contemporary culture hasn't produced any decent role models for its youth, especially when it comes to killing and violence; earlier generations were raised on murderous legends, people whose crimes often had heroic, mythological elements: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Bonnie & Clyde, Al Capone--they had class. They killed for good reasons. There was honor among thieves. They had some sense of morality, albeit criminal, but they were Romantic Moralists at heart; The Godfather's Don Corleone is an admirable example in the context of business negotiations and concern for one's family--and most important, he would never waste bullets on innocent strangers.

Sadly, those days are gone; your chances of witnessing a classic bank job or train hold-up are close to nil, but your odds of living next door to a twelve year old Timothy McVeigh wannabe are probably about even. Now that's stressful.