The Official JREF Lone Nut Challenge

Not exactly a lot of details on the killers or their motivations on these, but they appeared to act mostly alone (though most likely with some form of political motivation):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jing_Ke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holofernes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehud

Henry IV seemed to attract the crazies, 2 would be assassins and a successful one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_IV_of_France#Assassination_and_aftermath

In 1609, Ravaillac claimed to have experienced a vision instructing him to convince King Henry IV to convert the Huguenots to Catholicism. Between Pentecost 1609 and May 1610 Ravaillac made three separate trips to Paris with the intent of communicating his vision to the king, and lodged with Charlotte du Tillet, mistress of Jean Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, duc d'Épernon. Unable to meet the king, he interpreted Henry's decision to invade the Spanish Netherlands as the start of a war against the Pope. Determined to stop him, he decided to kill Henry. On 14 May 1610, he lay in wait in the Rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris (now south of the Forum des Halles); when the king passed, his carriage was halted by a blockage in the street, and Ravaillac stabbed Henry to death. Pierre de l'Estoile, the chronicler, stated of the king : His coach, entering from St Honoré to Ferronnerie Street, was blocked on one side by a cart filled with wine and on the other by a cart filled with hay... Ravaillac climbs on the wheel of the above-named coach and with a knife trenchant on both sides stabbed him between the second and third ribs.[3]
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Please explain to me why a "lone nut" can't have a political agenda? Many (Most?) of the lone nuts you list had political goals.
 
Galileo said:
Galileo wins. No lone nuts can be found prior to 1750.
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You truly are in denial of reality to say stuff like this after multiple examples are given to you. I have a feeling you've come up with some sort of "lone nuts are a Illuminati conspiracy!" angle and needed to create this thread to satisfy yourself, but as always you don't actually care to look at any of the evidence.

For you, its always been about what you want to believe.
 
Galileo said:
Galileo wins. No lone nuts can be found prior to 1750.
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The thing that surprised me in (briefly) looking into this is how few famous assassinations there were. Though thinking about it, prior to guns it was fairly difficult to pull one off. You had to be within a few feet of your target. Leaders throughout history were rarely publicly accessible and generally surrounded by guards. The most effective weapons were difficult to conceal (don't mind my broadsword, I'm just happy to see you!) and required a fair amount of skill and coordination to use. Even with training and planning it's difficult for an outsider to get close enough to a medieval king to get the chance to stab him, much less pull it off successfully. The idea of a King walking unprotected among the populace was practically farcical until modern times. (He must be the king! How do you know? He ain't got **** all over him!") Even in audiences with royalty most of the people in the room would be kneeling/genuflecting, not the best posture for an attack.

It seems that most of the successful assassinations required at least some amount of planning (or an unusually public appearance by the leader). It was certainly easier for the guards or people with access to kill their leader than a pure outsider, and there are numerous examples which fall into that category. And reporting of such events may or may not have been accurate, depending on what the motivations were... the next Divinely Mandated Ruler generally didn't want to mention in public that he offed the last one.

The advent of republics and democracies led to leaders needing to appear more approachable by their potential voters, so public appearances became more common. The improvements in weaponry meant that the potential lethal range for an attacker expanded greatly, and the ability to attack from concealment became a real possibility for those without access. Access to lethal weaponry also increased greatly over time as military weaponry was spread over larger and larger armies.

If you look at the Kennedy assassinations as examples, both occurred in public venues where you wouldn't have ever found a medieval king walking through. JFK was wide out in the open in an uncovered car and there were an infinite number of locales along his route where a sniper could have a shot at him. RFK was in an unsecured area and his assassin was able to conceal a pistol that was far deadlier and more suited for the task than any knife. Crowds were expected, and in fact required, for both of the leaders to accomplish their goals, but the very public nature of their appearances meant that opportunities for ambush were numerous.

The point (other than my need to ramble) being that it became a whole lot easier for a lone outsider to take out a leader with the advent of reliable, common, concealable firearms and leaders who are obligated to appear amongst the people.
 
Galileo said:
* the assassin must be a crazy person whose attack is irrational and doesn't advance his or her supposed big picture political goals
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Why is this a criteria? A psychotic person may very often have a fixed delusion, especially a delusion of reference with religious or political connotations. Go into any psychiatric facility and count the people who claim they are in contact with the CIA or angels. Heck, there's even a psychiatric condition called the Jerusalem Syndrome where certain types of psychotics are drawn to the city of Jerusalem.

The mere fact that a person kills for a reason does not mean that the reason makes sense. Nor does it mean that any sane person who believes in that reason would agree that murder is the right way to go about it.


* the version of the assassin's story must be the standard or official history of the event. In other words, if the authority figures of the time believe the assassin was part of a conspiracy, then the assassin is not a "lone nut".
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This needs to be much better defined. If there's an assassination attempt on a political leader the police are always going to assume there are more people involved than just the one. The authorities are going to assume some sort of conspiracy until one is ruled out because: a) they have no information; and b) they are trying to protect people from getting murdered. Hyper-vigilance is the absolute least that one can expect.

So, every single early report of every single assassination attempt in history is going to include the fact that authorities are checking into the person's ties to this or that organization.

The criteria you've set are just unrealistic.
 
Galileo wins. No lone nuts can be found prior to 1750.
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Totally. Only a few people on a single, small forum were willing to dig through obscure bits of history to satisfy some weirdo's arbitrary, pointless, and poorly constructed challenge in a 24 hour period. Furthermore, you ignored the people who did answer your challenge.

You are a real winner.
 
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So in short, Galileo makes a dishonest "challenge", and will of course not respond to the fact that people did find some "lone nut" anyway, despite how it was simply much more difficult in the old days to act alone (And we haven't even begun to consider that things like traveling was much harder than it became when cars and plane travels became commen; and that, due to no television and such, plenty of people probably didn't even know what their king looked like. To mention one thing.)

And in any case, the dishonest intentions of the thread - to "prove" that there can't be such a thing as a "lone nut" killer of prominent political figures - is based on a complete phallacy to begin with. After all, there are a lot of things that we have in the modern world today that we didn't have before 1750. World War 2, for instance, was only made possible (at least the scale of the thing and how quickly much of the expansion and retreats were made) thanks to the very, very improved firearms and travelling technologies. But if we're to use the same "logic" as the OP, then that war obviously never happened.

Not to mention that another thing we've become better at since 1750 is record-keeping. There's probably more than a few gaps in history where a "lone nut" have in fact done a murderous deed on a prominent figure, except that the records are now lost. Or maybe weren't even properly recorded in the first place.

Galileo loses the thread. Badly.
 
LightinDarkness said:
You truly are in denial of reality to say stuff like this after multiple examples are given to you. I have a feeling you've come up with some sort of "lone nuts are a Illuminati conspiracy!" angle and needed to create this thread to satisfy yourself, but as always you don't actually care to look at any of the evidence.

For you, its always been about what you want to believe.
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nice dodge. Can you name any lone nuts prior to 1750?

:jaw-dropp
 
Loss Leader said:
Why is this a criteria? A psychotic person may very often have a fixed delusion, especially a delusion of reference with religious or political connotations. Go into any psychiatric facility and count the people who claim they are in contact with the CIA or angels. Heck, there's even a psychiatric condition called the Jerusalem Syndrome where certain types of psychotics are drawn to the city of Jerusalem.

The mere fact that a person kills for a reason does not mean that the reason makes sense. Nor does it mean that any sane person who believes in that reason would agree that murder is the right way to go about it.





This needs to be much better defined. If there's an assassination attempt on a political leader the police are always going to assume there are more people involved than just the one. The authorities are going to assume some sort of conspiracy until one is ruled out because: a) they have no information; and b) they are trying to protect people from getting murdered. Hyper-vigilance is the absolute least that one can expect.

So, every single early report of every single assassination attempt in history is going to include the fact that authorities are checking into the person's ties to this or that organization.

The criteria you've set are just unrealistic.
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Then stop complaining and write a better criteria. Better yet, find a lone nut prior to 1750.
 
Aoidoi said:
The thing that surprised me in (briefly) looking into this is how few famous assassinations there were. Though thinking about it, prior to guns it was fairly difficult to pull one off. You had to be within a few feet of your target. Leaders throughout history were rarely publicly accessible and generally surrounded by guards. The most effective weapons were difficult to conceal (don't mind my broadsword, I'm just happy to see you!) and required a fair amount of skill and coordination to use. Even with training and planning it's difficult for an outsider to get close enough to a medieval king to get the chance to stab him, much less pull it off successfully. The idea of a King walking unprotected among the populace was practically farcical until modern times. (He must be the king! How do you know? He ain't got **** all over him!") Even in audiences with royalty most of the people in the room would be kneeling/genuflecting, not the best posture for an attack.

It seems that most of the successful assassinations required at least some amount of planning (or an unusually public appearance by the leader). It was certainly easier for the guards or people with access to kill their leader than a pure outsider, and there are numerous examples which fall into that category. And reporting of such events may or may not have been accurate, depending on what the motivations were... the next Divinely Mandated Ruler generally didn't want to mention in public that he offed the last one.

The advent of republics and democracies led to leaders needing to appear more approachable by their potential voters, so public appearances became more common. The improvements in weaponry meant that the potential lethal range for an attacker expanded greatly, and the ability to attack from concealment became a real possibility for those without access. Access to lethal weaponry also increased greatly over time as military weaponry was spread over larger and larger armies.

If you look at the Kennedy assassinations as examples, both occurred in public venues where you wouldn't have ever found a medieval king walking through. JFK was wide out in the open in an uncovered car and there were an infinite number of locales along his route where a sniper could have a shot at him. RFK was in an unsecured area and his assassin was able to conceal a pistol that was far deadlier and more suited for the task than any knife. Crowds were expected, and in fact required, for both of the leaders to accomplish their goals, but the very public nature of their appearances meant that opportunities for ambush were numerous.

The point (other than my need to ramble) being that it became a whole lot easier for a lone outsider to take out a leader with the advent of reliable, common, concealable firearms and leaders who are obligated to appear amongst the people.
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Opposition leaders to kings were among crowds frequently.

And ancient Kings ruled smaller populations were meeting the people had more pull. Unpopular kings had every reason to be like JFK and go among the People. Security wasn't as good, and bodyguards didn't have guns to protect the Kings.

They also had slingshots, javelins, bows N arrows, and rocks in those days of yore when lone nuts must have abounded.

They didn't have mental health professionals either, in the Roman Empire.

You just speculate without facts.

:eye-poppi
 
Hawk one said:
So in short, Galileo makes a dishonest "challenge", and will of course not respond to the fact that people did find some "lone nut" anyway, despite how it was simply much more difficult in the old days to act alone (And we haven't even begun to consider that things like traveling was much harder than it became when cars and plane travels became commen; and that, due to no television and such, plenty of people probably didn't even know what their king looked like. To mention one thing.)

And in any case, the dishonest intentions of the thread - to "prove" that there can't be such a thing as a "lone nut" killer of prominent political figures - is based on a complete phallacy to begin with. After all, there are a lot of things that we have in the modern world today that we didn't have before 1750. World War 2, for instance, was only made possible (at least the scale of the thing and how quickly much of the expansion and retreats were made) thanks to the very, very improved firearms and travelling technologies. But if we're to use the same "logic" as the OP, then that war obviously never happened.

Not to mention that another thing we've become better at since 1750 is record-keeping. There's probably more than a few gaps in history where a "lone nut" have in fact done a murderous deed on a prominent figure, except that the records are now lost. Or maybe weren't even properly recorded in the first place.

Galileo loses the thread. Badly.
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You're just upset that you can't locate any lone nuts.
 
In My Spare Time said:
So you're a liar. What an amazingly selective quote. Here's the rest of it:

That follows the comma in your quote immediately. You couldn't even post the entire sentence.
They guy slipped in on false pretenses and stabbed the guy. Perfect description of what you were looking for, but you're too freaking dishonest to aknowledge it.
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It says he was carrying false papers.

:p
 
Galileo said:
They also had slingshots,
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which aren't very deadly, are they Galileo?

javelins,
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which is a weapon that requires the type of skill that a serf or commoner would not have.

bows N arrows,
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again, as Aoidoi pointed out, we are talking about a weapon that requires skill and cannot be concealed



and rocks
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I suppose if there were organized cabals that killed several rulers by throwing the odd rock, then we would be puzzled by the lack of lone nuts that successfully completed their assassinations with hand-thrown rocks - but there weren't, so we aren't.


in those days of yore when lone nuts must have abounded.

They didn't have mental health professionals either, in the Roman Empire.
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No one is denying that mentally ill people may have wanted to kill the ruler. We are denying that they had the means or the opportunity.


But more importantly, what is the point you are trying to make? Even if you are 100% correct and there were opportunities for lone nuts to commit assassinations and there were no recorded occurrences of such - so what?
 
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