Suicide Attack
A suicide attack is an attack in which the attacker (attacker being either an individual or a group) intends to kill others and intends to die in the process of doing so (e.g. Columbine, Virginia Tech and 9/11). In a suicide attack in the strictest sense, the attacker dies by the attack itself, for example in an explosion or crash caused by the attacker. The term is sometimes loosely applied to an incident in which the intention of the attacker is not clear, though he is almost sure to die by the defense or retaliation of the attacked party, e.g., "suicide by cop", that is, menacing or assaulting an armed police officer with a weapon or apparent or proclaimed harmful intent which all but ensures that the cop will use deadly force to terminate the attack. This can also be referred to as murder/suicide.
Such attacks are typically motivated by religious or political ideologies, and have been carried out using numerous methods. For example, attackers might attach explosives directly to their bodies before detonating themselves close to their target, also known as suicide attack. They may use a car bomb or other machinery to cause maximum damage (e.g. Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War II).
Read more about this topic: Tentative Wound
Famous quotes containing the words suicide and/or attack:
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“Adolescents swing from euphoric self-confidence and a kind of narcissistic strength in which they feel invulnerable and even immortal, to despair, self-emptiness, self-deprecation. At the same time they seem to see an emerging self that is unique and wonderful, they suffer an intense envy which tears narcissism into shreds, and makes other people’s qualities hit them like an attack of lasers.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)