And the Answer is...

Apparently "yes."

I'd have stolen the title from the Geek with a .45's post linking to this story, but I've already used something very close to that for a different post of my own. Let's review:

Actress shot dead outside New York bar

Friday, January 28, 2005 Posted: 1724 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) -- An aspiring actress and playwright whose work explored life's darker sides was shot and killed as she confronted an armed robber during an early-morning street holdup.

The robber ran off with his accomplices, police said. No arrests have been made.

Nicole duFresne, 28, had just left a bar in a trendy section of the Lower East Side with her fiance and another couple early Thursday when they were approached by four or five men.

Witnesses told investigators that one of the men grabbed for the other woman's purse and duFresne intervened, asking, "What are you going to do, shoot us?" A man then fired one shot at her, police said.

"One of them said, 'Give me your money.' I didn't see he had a gun. I didn't understand what was happening," said Jeffrey Sparks, duFresne's 28-year-old fiance.

Sparks, an online music producer, said he pushed the mugger aside and was pistol-whipped on the face.

DuFresne died from a gunshot wound to her chest.

The couple, both from Minneapolis, moved to Brooklyn from Seattle two years ago and were to be married in October.

A graduate of Emerson College in Boston, duFresne was a founding member of the Present Tense Theater Project and acted with the LAByrinth Theater Co., according to her online resume. She wrote a play called "Burning Cage" with Mary Jane Gibson, who was with her and her fiance at the time of the shooting.

"Burning Cage" is about two women in a Boston asylum who are targeted for clandestine brainwashing experiments with LSD and shock treatments. The play toured in 2002 at fringe theater festivals in Canada and the United States.

DuFresne's other play, "Matter," is about an amnesiac whose apartment is taken over by a violent and seductive intruder. It was performed in Brooklyn in 2003.

Actress & playwright. Resident of New York. Former resident of Seattle. Apparently never a resident of Reality. I guess she believed that in gun-free NYC the answer to her question was "no." And I guess she didn't believe that someone would be willing to kill for the contents of someone else's purse.

And, I'm sure, her friends are blaming the gun for her death, not the goblin behind the trigger, though he could have just as easily have used a knife.

Why do so many people not understand that evil exists in the world, and is banal, not exotic? DuFresne wrote about how a "violent and seductive intruder" could invade an apartment, but can't believe someone will shoot her during a mugging? "Those without swords may still die upon them," indeed.