To Britons, assassination is a foreign word, a foreign act.
Author Brian McConnell wrote that sentence in a 1969 book called Assassination, and he did so with considerable evidence to back it up: though shooting incidents had been gradually increasing in Britain, guns and political terrorism were still notably scarce in British life. One evening last week in London, McConnell was given a persuasive reason to reconsider his analysis. As he was riding in a cab near Buckingham Palace, a white British Ford in front of him veered to the left, forcing a maroon Austin Princess limousine to a halt....