I think all New Yorkers have got used to occasional acts of extreme violence.

I'm thinking of attacks on the subway in particular.

And we sort of got used to occasional acts of really extreme violence, which, as you say, in this case, to my mind, is most notable for three things.

One is, as you mentioned, somebody carrying an assault rifle and not being stopped.

It's just an example of that breakdown of trust that can occur where nobody intervenes

because they see that the threat to them from intervening could mean threat comes from them

and so on.

The second is obviously the target and then the third is the way in which people wanted to

interpret the target.

I might add as well, I mean, you could throw in the system failures that would mean that somebody who had this number of flags could be walking around Manhattan.

And sadly, again, all of us who live in New York are used to the fact that very ill people roam the streets and are completely missed by the system.

But that last one of the way in which people reacted to it is especially troubling

because it's not a new phenomenon, but it's a replay of a phenomenon we've seen

before. I think of the violence carried out by groups like the Red Brigades in the 1960s and on.

In Germany, similar sort of left-wing Marxist revolutionary groups in Italy, would make a target of industrialists,

people they saw as capitalists.

There were years in that period in which the Italian, German, and other European authorities

had to deal with effectively a form of glamorized violence

from the radical left that believed that kidnapping businessmen, killing capitalists,

was some kind of noble revolutionary act.

And that at the time, also as today,

seeped into a form of the mainstream culture.

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