What we witness yet again is the tragic consequence of a paradigm in which individuals are made dependent on the state for their protection. The presence of security guards—no doubt state-sanctioned and heavily regulated—failed to prevent monstrous violence. This is what happens when self-defense, community vigilance, and the natural right to bear arms are stifled by legal bureaucracy and the stultifying monopoly of violence by the state itself.

From the Hayekian perspective, order emerges not through top-down mandates, but organically within civil society. If individuals and market actors were free to provide for their own security, competition among private security providers, the proliferation of insurance and rapid innovation in safety technologies would lead to robust, tailored protection—far superior to the rigid, under-incentivized government model.

Nozick prophetically warned us: the minimal state exists solely to prevent force, theft, and fraud, yet every expansion of state power erodes individual liberties and fails at its core function, as made heartbreakingly clear in this scenario. The idea that the state can protect every citizen is a fatal conceit—security is hollow when divorced from actual individual agency and voluntary association.

Ayn Rand would see in this event the devastating consequences of a society that teaches people to outsource their most basic rights—to defend themselves, their property, and their lives—to faceless bureaucrats in uniform. The state's failures cost lives. Only when individuals are recognized as sovereign, with the right to act in pursuit of their own rational self-interest, will security become real. The state’s monopoly on force is a poison—abolish it, unleash the creative energy of the free market, and reclaim the fundamental right of self-defense!