“A man’s got to know his limitations,” said the character Harry Callahan. A community also has to know its limitations. What can a community do? It can hold meetings. It can pass laws and resolutions. It can collect and spend money. It can affect things within its domain.

The murderers yesterday lived in multiple community domains. At least one of their domains embraced religiously motivated mass killing of innocent people.

Meanwhile, the majority of people in the publicly visible community domains which the killers shared when they weren’t preparing for their murders, apparently did not know about the murders the killers were preparing to do. Whatever clues to their intentions the killers may have left in the world as they travelled internationally and assembled their murderous hardware were insufficient to trigger a response in the general community.

So, these calls for a community discussion and a community response to end gun violence, to the extent they don’t account for things that happen outside of the general community, seem naïve.

Ironically, to aggravate the problem, we’re governed by a true Islamophobic president who cannot bring himself to openly address the murderous sub cult within the Islamic community who have on numerous occasions killed innocent people in American gun free zones.

Realistically, Islamophobic leadership added to the list of inherent community limitations makes the outcome of more religiously motivated innocent killing foreseeable. It will occur again.

Attempts to control the hardware for killing in the general community won’t have any affect inside the murderous sub cult of Islam, just as it’s impossible to keep weapons out of the hands of criminals.

Still, an individual can have a rational, instinctual response to the above set of circumstances, in the interest of self and family preservation. This is the position American individuals now find themselves. They can and must respond with anticipatory behaviors that will improve their chances of survival by reducing the set of their individual limitations.

Becoming more lethal, more evasive, more cautious, more mobile, getting in better physical condition, integrating defensive capacity into their lives, these are all rational responses for individuals to counter the risk of religiously motivated innocent killing that the general community limitations, by default, permit.

Different combinations are going to work for different people, but prudence would indicate that proceeding under the status quo until randomly harvested by a foreseeable threat is not a rational survival strategy.