Another weekend. Another tragedy. Another European nation coming to grips with the actions of a deranged man, where families mourn, survivors recount their remarkable stories of escape and authorities try and piece together what happened and why. Last weekend, a man seemingly acting alone, drove a heavy truck at high speed down a crowded Nice promenade in France, turning his vehicle into a killing machine with deadly effectiveness. And on Friday evening, a lone German-Iranian teen takes an automatic rifle into a crowded Munich shopping centre and opens fire indiscriminately, before ending his last deadly and desperate deed with a self-inflicted gunshot.
The list of these incidents seems to have no end and we are becoming increasingly numb to the scale of the events, the reasoning behind the deeds and their sheer frequency. Given that the teen gunman killed himself, authorities must now try and unravel the mystery of his madness and figure out, if they ever can, what motivated him to become a killer.
There is a danger that every incident is now branded terrorism, an incident carried out to advance a political philosophy, a murderous event that is claimed by Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) or inspired by its aims. But there is also a reality that there seems to be an illness within society where loneliness or desperation may make the demented capable of carrying out such gruesome acts. That is not terrorism, it is a mental depravity fostered by a culture that is all too accustomed to such deeds. There is now a blurring of the lines between terrorists and terror, cause and effect, the depraved and the just plain desperate.
