Do you kill off your characters?

It depends on the reaction I want from my reader. If I feel I have to kill off a bunch of characters I often wonder if I should have had those characters in the first place. The element of surprise should play a part. In my first novel I had two characters. One you would like and the other you'd hate. In the end you would have a totally different perspective. Randomly killing off characters for no reason doesn't work for me. You have to make it mean something. Take Rowling as an example of bad killing. She totally contradicted herself when she killed off Dumbledore. It was a stupid move on her part. Make it work for you. The novel I'm currently working on has characters that die so others can be born and it works for what I'm writing.