I wrote a linklog post a while back that pointed to this “instruction manual” for being an assassin. I thought it was an interesting idea, even if the manual itself is lacking quite a bit. (And rightly so, because it shouldn’t be so easy to learn these things over the web.)
After a while, I started getting comments of people looking to become assassins. They were looking for training or something, I’m not exactly sure. I played along in my comments, telling them that they needed to find an “admission counselor” to get into our program. Obviously, they would not actually find such a counselor here, but they might spin their wheels trying to get into our exclusive (and reclusive) club.
Whether these folks have started taking this thing seriously, or are just playing along, I can’t say. It’s disturbing that there are so many reputed young people that have interest in this line of work. It’s disturbing that so many other folks seem to think they know anything about assassination. The comments both on the post and still in the moderation queue are replete with messages of, “It’s not like you see in the movies, fools.” As if those people even know. But why are these people even coming to my site based on a one-sentence link?
Apparently, if you search for “become an assassin” on Google, my old one-line, one-link page is the fourth result. Unbelieveable. Why are people searching for this? Do they really think that they can find some technical information about online assassin training?
While poking around on the net a bit to figure out why people had found my original post, I found something else that’s disturbing. It seems that people have actually listed “be an assassin” as a goal. I can’t even imagine. Most of them list assassination as the only thing they could think of wanting to do. The others either list “become an assassin” right next to paradoxical entries like “become a doctor”, or near other similar entries, like “kill some people” and the weird one, “kill someone in self defense”. Can you really have that as a goal? Weird.
Assassination isn’t a profession you aspire to, people. It’s kind of like prostitution — you don’t grow up fantasizing about prostituting yourself, your situation dictates what you need to do to survive.
If you’re really interested in assassination, here are my recommendations:
Buy a video game. Video games these days give you plenty of chances to kill other people for money. My recent favorite, Oblivion, has a whole hidden guild and contracts that let you work your way up to the top of the organization. There are even plenty of assassin organizations in the massively multiplayer games where you can work outside the game rules as an assassin.
Play Street Wars. Street Wars is a game you play in real life with water guns. You get contracts, and you attack them with non-lethal water sprays. Don’t let the description lull you into thinking it’s a simple game. The participants usually go out of their way to concoct elaborate true-assassin “killing” methods.
Read a book. There have been a ton of famous assassinations over the years. US presidents Lincoln, Garfield (neat link!), McKinley, and Kennedy were assassinated. Practically every major country in the world has had an assassination attempt on its leaders. Famous authors have written popular plays about assassins. There is assassin fiction out the wazoo.
Role play. There used to be a dedicated full class for Assassins in 2nd Edition D&D, but it’s a prestige class in 3rd Edition and it’s not all that impressive. Nonetheless, as with any roleplaying game, you get out of it what you make of it. Just remember that you’re playing a game, and the action stops there. Or you could be into something else entirely.
The bottom line is, I don’t condone this behavior, and am becoming more disturbed by the interest in it, especially from people who say they’re 12 years old. Seriously, I’ve gotten more interest in the assassin post than I have for errant searches for nonces that have terminated here.
If you’re a teenager or a pre-teen looking to become an assassin instead of finishing school, please seek counseling. If you’re older, you should know better than to take any of this seriously.
