A sad loner is jailed. But the real ‘terror threat’ is still roaming our streets, says PETER HITCHENS
By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday PUBLISHED: 11:24 AEDT, 4 February 2018
Darren Osborne, the mosque van killer jailed on Friday, is an unhinged, chaotic nobody, his mind spinning with drugs and drink, who knows and cares as much about politics as I know about football
It is astonishing how we cannot see what is in front of our noses when we are blinded by dogma. We cannot, for instance, see that Darren Osborne, the mosque van killer jailed on Friday, is an unhinged, chaotic nobody, his mind spinning with drugs and drink, who knows and cares as much about politics as I know about football.
More than a dozen times I have pointed out here that almost all rampage killers, all over the world, have one thing in common — the use of mind-altering drugs. I am not trying to exonerate them. On the contrary. But I am trying to prevent these things happening in future by being much tougher on illegal drugs, and much more cautious with legal prescriptions.
Sometimes it is cannabis. Sometimes it is steroids. Sometimes it is prescription ‘antidepressants’ — themselves a scandal waiting to be exposed and understood.
But it’s always there. I look and I find it. Any number of American and European school and campus massacres, the Charlie Hebdo murders, the Japanese care home knife killings, the Nice truck massacre, Anders Breivik, the Lee Rigby murder, the Westminster van killer. These and many more we know for certain. In many other cases we don’t know only because the authorities have never bothered to find out.
These killings are a subset of violent crime, but they are unusually closely studied, which is how we know. My guess is that a huge amount of violent crime is also committed by people who have derailed their sanity by taking mind-altering drugs. But the authorities are even less interested in that
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-5348749/Peter-Hitchens-Real-terror-threat-roaming-streets.html#ixzz56HssBEBX