NEW YORK In his play Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Eliot describes the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, as a silently ordered hit. The English king, Henry II, did not need to give a direct order his knights knew what to do with somebody seen to be undermining the state.

The shooting in Newtown was not only especially horrific and heartbreaking, but is also part of an increasingly common pattern a specific kind of murder suicide that has been carefully studied by psychologists and psychiatrists. Loners, often with paranoid tendencies, commit these heinous acts as part of their own suicide.