

After the Paris attacks of November 2015, a police officer told me how lucky Britain was to be an island as it made it more difficult to bring in the type of weaponry used in the French capital. Such laws can’t stop attacks, but they can help reduce the sort of death tolls witnessed in the United States with its ease of access to weapons. In that sense, other restrictions in the UK, such as the difficulty in accessing firearms and ammunition through strict gun laws, make the job of terrorists that much more difficult. Containment and resiliency represent the only realistic approaches to this type of violence.
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It is simply not feasible in a free society to stop individuals bent on carrying out such mayhem. This is doable terrorism in which normal tools of life, such as a motor vehicle or a kitchen knife, become instruments of carnage.

First, the nature of the attack speaks unarguably to the unstoppable nature of such violent acts. Some other points need to be made with regards to this attack. Then the solution from the perspective of the attacker to what amounts to a wasted life emerges through an act of extreme violence. This type of attacker, who is almost always a man, a factor frequently ignored in the rush to focus on religious or political beliefs, will have drifted through life, with frequent involvement in petty crime and substance abuse. If any of the labels do fit then according to previous precedents, lone-actor terrorists tend to experience difficulties in life, including, often, bouts of mental illness. Some academics insist it can only apply to an individual acting completely alone others use the label to apply to individuals and pairs some don’t bother to define the label at all. This appears to have been a lone-actor terrorist attack although the problem with attaching such a label is that there is, as with terrorism, no set definition of lone-actor terrorism. That may well be the new norm for terrorism but it is important to remember that the attack occurred on the first anniversary of the Brussels attack, which involved decidedly different terrorism tactics. In the modus operandi of today, specifically the use of a vehicle, London resembles, albeit thankfully on a smaller scale compared to some, the attacks in Nice (and other cities in France before that), Berlin, and even in the United States, specifically Ohio State University. Such is the nature of terrorism in the modern age. And not just anywhere in the UK but in the capital just outside of the “mother of parliaments.” The end result is five dead, including the attacker and a police officer, many serious injuries and widespread fear, the latter amplified through social media. As UK security agencies have warned repeatedly, including through the Terrorism Threat Level forecast that a terrorist attack is “ highly likely", an act of ideological violence has taken place.
