A few hours before Jews were slaughtered in Belgium, a young madman was shooting and knifing people of his age in California. Besides the fact that the two killings happened in a gun-free zone, there seem to be few similarities between the two criminal acts.

The Santa Barbara killer was a very disturbed young man, as obvious from his troubling video. But civilization and morals used to teach a man to control himself, not to yield to all instincts, desires or frustrations, wherever he sat on the continuum between normal and mad. (The killer had been diagnosed with “high functioning Asperger’s” as a child.) Obviously, this constraint has been much softened—a thesis I defended in my post on “The Rise of the Young Mass Killer.”

And we must recall that in places like California (and Belgium), ordinary citizens cannot easily carry handguns to protect themselves.

The result of all this is that anybody who puts his feet into a BMW and his hands on a gun or knife is a possible threat.

The reaction of the very authorities responsible for social-engineering such a society will probably be to try and further restrict the right of the innocent to defend themselves. And watch the backlash against people deemed to be mentally disturbed or different, and guilty of pre-crimes.