The Java Tutorial points out that Errors are typically external to the Java application and thus normally cannot and should not be caught or handled by the application.

Improper Exception Handling (ArithmeticException): The code attempts to divide by zero and shows how to catch this exception but not handle it properly. A more robust solution would involve ...

These are just normal exceptions. To really crash a VM there are 3 ways: Use JNI and crash in the native code. If no security manager is installed you can use reflection to crash the VM. This is VM ...