The act of murder on London’s Westminster Bridge has been the subject of endless news coverage over the last few days, but while it is welcome to the media channels which are invariably dependent on that kind of excitement to pep things up and fill the hours, the reality is that there really isn’t much to dissect and discuss. What we have here is a situation in which somebody drove his vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians and killed some of them. There isn’t much at all that can be read into that.

It wasn’t a highly planned and skilfully executed strategy with stunningly catastrophic results, like the destruction of Manhattan’s twin towers in 2001. It wasn’t a hijack in which terrorists somehow managed to get some kind of weapons onto a plane. It wasn’t even a bomb in an underground train station, which requires some degree of planning and provides lots of media and police opportunities for investigation into and speculation about who did it.

It was just some angry man who got into his car, picked a crowded spot in the city, and drove into a crowd of people, killed some as he was bound to do, then ran about with knives trying to kill others, but only managed one police officer who tried to stop him. The first time this happened in the south of France, when a man drove his lorry into the crowds on a promenade, it was bound to happen again and again, to be copied by others. Because it really is the easiest thing.

You don’t need weapons, you don’t need a bomb, you don’t even need to go to the trouble of smuggling your guns into a crowded hall or mall. You just get into your ordinary car or lorry like everyone else, drive off, but then go off the road and into as many people as possible who would be there anyway. And nobody suspects you because you’re just another guy in a vehicle. Anybody can do it. You just have to be crazy and bad enough to want to. In fact, somebody went and did the same thing in Berlin last December, hijacking a lorry and ploughing it into shoppers at a Christmas market.

And maybe this is exactly what scares people, the reason for these endless debates on television and the news portals: that anybody can do it, anywhere and at any time, and that no amount of anti-terrorist intelligence or scanning for weapons can stop it. Now, all cars and other vehicles have become weapons that you can’t ban or scan for, and every driver is a potential killer. You don’t even need to be a terrorist, or affiliated to a terrorist group. You just have to be a psychopath whose switch has tripped and who wants to go out with a bang. All those men who have traditionally and historically gone berserk in crowded areas like cinemas, restaurants and shopping malls, with submachine guns, killing many people before turning the gun on themselves or being shot by police (suicide by cop) are now seen as having gone through a lot of trouble they needn’t have. Why bother getting hold of a submachine gun and going out to cut people down one by one when you can just get into your car and drive it into a crowd? Yes, that’s what people are afraid of – that it’s going to happen again and again, heaven alone knows where and when, because all psychopaths have access to a car but they don’t all have access to a submachine gun.

The news networks are struggling to connect Adrian Elms, who committed the London murders a few days ago, with some Islamic terrorist network. They shouldn’t bother. It’s become increasingly clear that Islam is now the excuse used by every whacko in the West who feels driven to extreme violence. It doesn’t follow that every random, lone-wolf psycho who kills people is affiliated to an Islamic terrorist group, and trying to prove that they are only serves to downplay the very real danger that those terrorist groups pose. They are capable – as with the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers – of seriously extreme acts that are very well planned. To suggest that they have now been reduced to getting crazed thugs to drive their cars into crowds is to lull ourselves into an unreal sense that this is the worst they can do.

 

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