Deranged individuals don't need a gun to murder scores of innocent people; a lesson vividly and horrifically on display in Zhuhai, China on Monday night when a man intentionally drove his car into a crowd outside a sports center, killing at least 35 people and leaving almost four dozen others with injuries. 

According to Chinese state-run media, the attacker is a 62-year-old man who stabbed himself after ramming his off-road vehicle into a group of people who were exercising outside the sports center. Attacks like this have become more common in China in recent months, despite the surveillance state imposed by the Communist government. And though China prohibits gun ownership, individuals have used knives, vehicles, and other improvised weapons to engage in acts of mass violence. 

News of the death toll sent shockwaves through Chinese social media, although the topic only ranked 11th on Weibo, China’s X-like platform, which is subject to strict internet censorship.

“I’m utterly speechless aside from being shocked. I need a moment of silence to calm myself down,” one person wrote on Weibo.

China has seen a number of recent attacks against civilians, including children and foreigners.

In September, a bus crushed into a group of students and parents outside a school in the eastern province of Shandong, killing at least 11 people.

The same month, a 10-year-old Japanese boy was killed after he was stabbed on his way to a Japanese school in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

In October, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, three people were killed and 15 others were injured in a knife attack at a supermarket in Shanghai.

Chinese media reports that authorities in Zhuhai say they haven't been able to talk to the suspect, who is reportedly in a coma after stabbing himself in the neck, but he was reportedly upset over the division of assets and property after a divorce. 

Some analysts believe that China's tottering economy is largely to blame for the increasing number of incidents of mass violence. 

“When domestic demand is so weak and the largest property bubble the world has ever seen has popped, the wealth of the vast majority of households is shrinking and that will inevitably cause a lot of social tensions,” said Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of California, San Diego.

... The sense that the attackers in such incidents are possibly acting out of frustration with a rapidly changing society also points to the country’s relatively low spending on social welfare and mental health services, especially during economic hard times.

“We saw a similar thing in the U.S. in 2008 and 2009,” Mr. Shih said. “But the difference is that in the U.S. there was a bit of a social safety net, like social security payments for the unemployed to dull the edge of economic hardship. There is nothing like this in China.”

In theory, Communism is supposed to provide every social safety net you can think of, but it never seems to work out that way, any more than a totalitarian state can provide total security and safety for individual citizens. 

In virtually every society, a small number of desperate, despairing, deranged, or downright evil individuals will choose to lash out at strangers with murderous intent. It doesn't matter what kind of gun control laws are in place, because the issue isn't the gun (or the knife, or the car). It's the human being who decides, for whatever reason, that innocent people need to suffer right along with them.

I don't know what the answer is, but I know that this isn't a gun problem. It's far deeper than that, and trying to ban or restrict whatever object a mass killer might use is going to be utterly ineffective at preventing these attacks wherever they might occur.