London attacker was a convicted Islamic terrorist . . . and he'd been released from prison early

So the “de-radicalization” programs they offer in British prisons don’t actually cure radical Islamists of their radicalism? I don’t know what to believe in anymore.

If anyone could have been foreseen as a probably repeat offender, it should have been Usman Khan. Not only was he involved with a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange, he also had plans to start a “terrorist military training facility” and was raising money for it before his arrest and conviction in 2012.

If he doesn’t sound to you like a low-level player, that’s because he wasn’t. Yet six years after his conviction, he was released, and nobody seems willing to own the decision:

The Parole Board said it had played no role in Khan’s early release. It said the convict “appears to have been released automatically on license (as required by law), without ever being referred to the board.”

Neil Basu, the Metropolitan Police counterterrorism police, said Saturday afternoon that the conditions of Khan’s release had been complied with. He didn’t spell out what those conditions were or why they failed to prevent him from killing two people.

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The automatic release program apparently means no agency was given the task of determining if Khan still believed in radical views he had embraced when he was first imprisoned for plotting to attack a number of sites and individuals in London.

Did Khan “still believe in radical views”? Here’s a wild guess: Yes.

Because Khan used knives and not a gun to commit the attack, there’s of course the temptation to tweak the gun control people and point out that killers will just use knives instead. That’s acutally a pretty weak argument, because if Khan had used an AR-15 he obviously could have killed a lot more than two people, and probably no one in the crowd would have rushed him.

Those of us who oppose gun control sound like idiots if we argue that knives are just as dangerous as guns. They’re not. The reason I oppose gun control is my belief that criminals will get guns anyway, and if it’s illegal for everyone else to have them then you lose all hope of taking down a shooter via someone else who’s packing.

Anyway, fun fact about the bystanders who charged Khan and stopped him from taking his carnage any further. One of them is a convicted murderer himself. In 2003, James Ford murdered a disabled 21-year-old woman named Amanda Champion, who was said to have the mental age of 15. Ford slit Champion’s throat.

Needless to say, when people started declaring Ford and others “heroes” for their actions in stopping Khan, the family of Amanda Champion dissented. You can’t fault Ford for what he did on Friday – and I suppose 16 years can change a man in serious ways – but that doesn’t mean he deserves to ever be released. And he hasn’t been, by the way. Ford was on a supervised day work program when he found himself in Khan’s crosshairs, and I guess he did what he thought he had to do.

So let’s see if we’ve got this straight. Khan was convicted of terrorism in 2012. Ford was convicted of murder in 2003. And yet they were both out in public on this fine fall day. This is how the justice system works in Britain?

Maybe Boris Johnson can pick up a few extra seats in the upcoming election just by vowing to keep violent criminals behind bars. It seems no one else in the UK has thought of it yet.