Arguments about evil risk distracting us from practical questions that could save lives in the future

Why? Why us, why here, why that day of all days; but most of all why our girls, our tiny excited girls, happily making bracelets for each other in a summer holiday workshop?

Such questions that must have been tormenting Southport families ever since last July, when a then 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana brutally murdered three of their children and tried to kill eight more (as well as two adults) in what prosecutors this week called a “sadistic” attack. The parents got no answers from the dock, where the boy – now man – who took their daughters sat silent, but for some oddly petulant outbursts against the judge. But in a sense the question is unanswerable. No motive, no twisted ideology or mental illness, could ever explain stabbing a six-year-old. Debating whether or not this was terrorism “misses the point”, the judge said as he sentenced Rudakubana to 52 years in prison. He would have killed them all if he could.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist