OP: I've committed more than one pointless atrocity...
Examples of moves I have made:
1. Camp at popular anarchy nav beacon with fellow 'squad' players in our teamspeak channel. Another player steals (in our eyes anyway) one of our kills, all 3 or 4 of us line up on his six and blast him
2. Same beacon as above, except we just feel like having the nav beacon to ourself and we instantly chase away (with laser fire) any other human player who spawns in.
3. Same beacon as above. Played solo after coming home from the bars one time, very very drunk. Removed all expensive modules from my ship to minimize rebuy costs and made it my mission to kill any player controlled sidewinders and eagles in the sector and not quit until I was killed myself. Racked up a LOT of player kills doing that and of course finally ended up getting killed myself. move, I know. For some reason I thought it was funny at the time.
4. Different, much less populated anarchy nav beacon. Was widdling down a NPC python worth around 100K. Only 1 other player in the sector, and noticed he was "following" me and this Python around, but not taking a single shot. This game causes me to assume the worst about players (see my behavior in example 3....) and I figured he was either: waiting for me to take some shield/hull damage from the Python, blow me up and steal the NPC kill. Or waiting for me to get Python down to a low %, open up on it with fully charged weapon banks and steal my kill. So I stop shooting at the NPC python, and position myself behind the player controlled Viper. Opened up on him full w/ full weapon banks, chased him around down to 0% and BOOM.
So yeah, this game attracts all kinds of players for better or worse. If you really want to be safe, you have to go solo or group mode. Sad but it is what it is. I feel this point will eventually chase away many "good natured" players from open play, leaving the open play game mode generally populated by d-bags.