In no democratic country, in no city governed by democratic systems and governed by the rule of law and not by police states, absurd and painful episodes such as that of the stabbing of a woman in Piazza Gae Aulenti in Milan are avoidable, nor entirely preventable. Not even in totalitarian states, after all, where police and armies patrol the streets and citizens’ freedoms are arbitrarily limited, can one really rule out the possibility of someone leaving home with a long kitchen knife and sticking it in someone’s back, on the street, at random. In short, even the most contracted and restricted spaces of freedom provide for the permanence of the freedom to harm someone else. It is an obviously “unacceptable” use of freedom, as the mayor of Milan Beppe Sala self-evidently said: and yet it can happen.

Proportionate penalties

How can it happen that someone who goes around with a knife to harm a poor random person is already known to have done so about ten years earlier, and this is precisely the case of Vincenzo Lanni. At the time of the first crime, he was not under psychiatric care, he had shown no signs of danger while, probably, he had begun to descend the slope of paranoia, depression, solitary and resentful obsession towards the world. He then looked for elderly people and single women to attack and stab, because he considered them easier targets. After years of prison and of community and psychiatric care he was evidently still seeking the same objectives, yesterday morning in Milan, in one of the busiest and most lived-in squares of the city, which at night is undoubtedly the “outskirts” of the nightlife of Corso Como and the anonymous comings and goings of Porta Garibaldi, but during the day it is simply the hub of human traffic for those who go to work. Obviously history, if we look at it with a little clarity, also reminds us of another thing: liberal democracies give punishments proportionate to the crimes committed. Anyone who commits a crime, after having served their sentence, can do so again, and there is no way to prevent this risk absolutely, just as it is not possible – as we said above – to prevent crimes of any kind from taking place, in general, in the city, in the countryside or at the seaside.

These should be common sense considerations, even if they are not appreciated by common sense, which now tends to invoke revenge and the death penalty for every crime. And yet no one who has a public voice, anywhere, anymore takes the responsibility of saying that a certain level of risk cannot be eliminated in free societies and especially in large cities, on the one hand, and that not even the most efficient judicial and prison system in the world can prevent those who have committed crimes from committing them again.

Yet no one says these obvious things. Instead, we read of a regional councilor who bears the same surname as the president of the Senate casually blaming “one of the many homeless people who lives in the area”. Or former ministers born Berlusconi, who moved to the Calendian center and returned to the center-right, talk about an “out-of-control Milan”, and these would be the results. Going further down the level, although it may not seem easy, we find even more bizarre statements from political figures who are in the opposition in Milan but party comrades of those who govern in Rome, and who in addition to saying false things, believe – and it is even more serious – that blaming a mayor for an event like this could be useful to their small political cause. In this context, the moderation of Attilio Fontana deserves praise.

Avoid exploitation

The president of the Lombardy Region explicitly avoided any exploitation and limited himself to expressing closeness to the victim of the stabbing, who is an employee of Finlombarda, a company that is part of the regional system. No less disconcerting is the fact that no one on the centre-left defines these pitiful propaganda exercises by their name. And the same, even more, applies to intellectuals of all colours, who should at least underline the psychiatric condition of the person, of the story, and the related social issue, of investments in the field, and of treatment of that discomfort. It is as if the impossibility of telling oneself the truth, and saying what one thinks, had taken over the public debate. If you think about it, it is something bigger and more serious than the ugly, bloody event that occurred in Porta Nuova, Milan.