> There doesn't seem to be a very large overlap between willingness to commit violent crime and the technical competency to turn off-the-shelf consumer products

> There doesn't seem to be a very large overlap between willingness to commit violent crime and the technical competency to turn off-the-shelf consumer products into weapons. Good insight, which I will tack my own thought onto: the kind of person that would be successful at this would probably have the right mindset to work in an engineering job, and people who do that are both earning enough that they have no need to turn to crime, and too busy to be a political or religious extremist (something about idle hands and the devil's work...) Still. Stabbing and other unsophisticated attacks seems to be relatively recent and primarily a feature of Islamic terrorism. If I am correct, then... > My interpretation: they lack the necessary knowledge to make explosives, aren't capable of self-learning either, and settle for a vastly inferior but readily available knife. ...I have an alternative, perhaps entirely wrong interpretation: Islamic terrorism typically requires that its most skilled and most dedicated operatives kill themselves in the course of their first and only attack. Which is to say, they're running out of good operatives. Meh, perhaps your original interpretation is better :)