Management Alternatives

The Thesis

"...what unusual thesis underlies this literary work?"

An underlying thesis of The Dying Game trilogy involves the provocative question, "Do law-abiding people kill?"

O'Neal believes they do. To determine if his thesis was realistic, O'Neal searched the national crime statistics to determine why people commit murder. He was not surprised by the results.

Here is a summary of the table that contained data related to his thesis:

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1998, Table 339, p. 213.

These results were also consistent with data for the years prior to 1996 and when they were compiled into two groups, criminal and law-abiding, the answer was clear.

Since this data was compiled from police investigations around the country, O'Neal concluded that the murders classified as felonies were certainly committed by non-law-abiding people (i.e., criminals) because their original intent seemed to be the killing of another person. They equal 19.5% of the total.

Here is where it gets a bit confusing. Since arguments and other motives are not against the law, the persons doing those killings were law-abiding at the time prior to the killing. There are some qualifications that will be mentioned later, but for now since these murders were not classified as felonies, the killers were still law-abiding person. That group equals 51.6% of the total and seems to validate O'Neal's claim.

Other motives is a rather nebulous label and it is unclear exactly what it includes, but if it involved any criminal intent then O'Neal reasoned it would have had a label that indicated such intent for the killer. He further concludes that the category includes the remaining non-argument and non-criminal motives.

One might argue that the status of the killer, either criminal or law-abiding, is unknown from the data in this table. While true, data analysis requires certain assumptions to simplify our view of the situation and that is what needed to happen here. Since we do not know that status, we must assume it is law-abiding unless the subsequent police investigation determined otherwise and classified the killing as a felony.

While the crime data supports his thesis, O'Neal asked perhaps several thousand people the same question as he traveled around the country. Most did not bat an eye before responding that they would kill in certain circumstances.

Those who hesitated to consider the question responded with qualifications such as "Unfortunately, yes," or "Sadly, I'd kill too." He was surprised that no one disagreed with him.