Mass murder victims in Nice came from 27 countries

The 84 people killed last week in Nice, when yet another disturbed young man tried to exorcise his demons by going on a murder rampage – because let’s face it, it’s always unbalanced young or youngish men with antisocial personalities, compounded by psychiatric problems, who do these things across the world – came from 27 countries and 30 of them were Muslims.

Talk of ISIS and terrorism only serves to distract us from the fact of just how dangerous young men with anti-social personalities and psychiatric problems can be, and how many people can and will die if the warning signs are ignored or given the head-in-the-sand treatment by those around them.

The Nice killer’s father told the press in France that he and his family were well aware that his son had psychiatric problems. But then again, you wouldn’t imagine that the psychiatric problems would manifest themselves in that extreme way. There is, however, indisputably a clear psychological profile of the sort of disturbed young man who does these things, and it is separate to the profile of a terrorist.

The Nice killer falls into the category of Andreas Lubitz, the unbalanced Germanwings pilot who deliberately brought down his plane to destroy it and to kill all his passengers and also of James Holmes, who entered a cinema in Colorado and began shooting at people who were watching a Batman film.

There are many, many other examples:

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris who committed the Columbine High School massacre;

Thomas Hamilton, who entered a school in Dunblane, Scotland, and began shooting at children and their teachers;

Anders Behring Breivik, who killed more than 70 teenagers in a rampage in Norway;

and so many more examples that it is really demoralising to read about them. I seem to remember that there were two cases in Malta, too – a man who got on a bus and began shooting at people, and another man who went out into the street and began shooting at passers-by and the neighbours, killing a boy and wounding others as I recall, after his wife had a go at him for failing to stand up for their son. But that was in the days before Maltese newspapers were online so I can’t find any references.

Terrorist groups in the past assimilated many anti-social young men and ISIS is still doing it today, but this profile is a little different. These are men who either suddenly snap after a prolonged period of psychiatric trouble and go on an impromptu rampage (and I think the Nice killer is one of them, that he will have decided to get into his lorry and drive at people and over them) or individuals who are hate-driven and feel emarginated and plan their big act of revenge (the Germanwings pilot, the Batman film shooter).

This is the kind of thing to which we need to give some thought before screaming ‘terrorism’ (the man with the axe on the German train is another such case, aged 17), if only because blaming every lone wolf disturbed man’s acts of vengeance on terrorism detracts from the very problem of real terrorism itself.