The other day, I was down in my basement, and my 15-year-old walked in, picked up one of his old Nerf guns, and said to me, “You know Krav Maga. Take this gun away from me. Show me how you disarm someone pointing a weapon at you.” With the qualification that it’s not exactly as simple as he suggested, I took the gun away from him and then did it again and again. After about the third time, he took maybe six or seven steps back away from me and asked, “What do you do now?” I replied, “Well…nothing.”

What he had discovered, after only about a minute or two of interaction, was the stark truth about firearms. A gun is a distance weapon. Those who foolishly try to use them in close quarters deserve to have them taken away, to be disarmed. Those who use them as they’re intended, however, who maintain their distance from their target, are largely unstoppable. Neither Krav Maga nor any other hand-to-hand combat/defense system nor anything else, really, can stop a gun in that case.

Maybe seven or eight years ago, I took my daughter—then a first- or second-degree black belt in taekwondo—to a couple of successive weekend knife training seminars. The first weekend was two days of training in defensive knife techniques, that is, learning to protect oneself from an attacker armed with a knife. The second, in turn, covered offensive knife skills, learning to use a knife as a deterrent and, if necessary, to stop an attacker.

Neither of us emerged from those two weekends of training as knife-fighting experts, but we did learn a great deal, including the fact that a knife, unlike a gun, is an extremely effective, extremely dangerous close-quarters weapon. In order to defend against and survive a knife attack, one must first recognize the presence of the weapon and then effectively smother it. The best defense against a knife attack, of course, is to get as far away from the attacker as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible.

The point of all of this, sadly, is that it’s pretty difficult to stop a motivated and even moderately clever person from killing or badly injuring someone. If he (or she) wants you dead badly enough and has the sense and the opportunity to pick the setting of his attack shrewdly, then he’s going to have a really good chance of succeeding.

For more than a decade now, I have been telling friends, readers, clients—anyone who’d listen, really—that it is now and will become increasingly important in the future to be strong and resilient: physically strong, emotionally resilient, spiritually active, financially tough and flexible, and able to handle oneself in a variety of potentially fraught situations. A big part of this is preparation, doing the planning, training, and homework to be “antifragile” (as Nassim Taleb puts it). Another part of it is attitude, having the confidence to handle what you can and the humility to ask for help when necessary. But even all of this is sometimes not enough.

As we have all learned over the past couple of weeks, and as Robert Burns warned us 240 years ago, sometimes even “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” There is nothing Charlie Kirk could have done to prevent Tyler Robinson from killing him. It didn’t matter how strong Kirk was or how prepared, or even that he was an extremely and openly religious man. Even if he were a cross between Hafthor Bjornsson and Imi Lichtenfeld himself, Kirk could not have stopped his assassin’s bullet.

The same is true of Iryna Zarutska. The horrifying picture of her that has been all over the internet this week tells her story. As she looks up at her murderer, shocked and horror-struck that someone is standing above her, her fate is already sealed. She was dead before she likely even understood what had happened, much less recognized that her attacker had a knife. There was nothing she—or anyone else—could have done to stop him. Even if she had been a cross between Hafthor Bjornsson and Imi Lichtenfeld, she still would have died.

As I said, if someone wants you dead badly enough….

Thus has it always been for man, dating back at least to the time of the man, the woman, the snake, and the apple. Indeed, that man and that woman had two sons, one of whom brutally murdered the other out of petty jealousy. This is man’s nature as a fallen creature. It is who he is—who we are.

To combat that fallen nature, to protect against those with malice in their hearts, man created something we call “society.” The first great society in human history developed in the Mesopotamian region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq, between 7500 and 6000 years ago. Over the course of the next 2000-3000 years, the great civilization of Sumer grew and prospered in this fertile part of the world. The proto-written history of Sumer dates to around 3000 BC or even earlier, placing this written language in roughly the same epoch as ancient Egyptian proto-writing, among the first ever created. The first written language in Sumer with a decipherable syllabary dates to about 2300 BC, just before the region reached its golden age.

Over the next 250 years, the Mesopotamian region saw the rise and fall of various dynasties—the Akkadians and Gutians—until the region was united under the rule of Ur-Nammu, the king, fittingly enough, of Ur, the greatest of the five great walled cities of Sumer. Ur was the first city on earth with more than 50,000 people. It was the first great massing of men and women who were not related to one another and were not part of the same kin group. Because this was the case, Ur required rules, and Ur-Nammu created the first (or at least the oldest known) code of law, covering everything from crime to labor to currency and credit. Ur-Nammu’s code predated the Babylonian Hammurabi’s much more famous code by nearly three centuries.

In Ur and its king, Ur-Nammu, we see the establishment and solidification of the concepts that would enable man to live together in massive communities, in the clear absence of familial ties and hierarchies, and yet in relative peace and harmony. In Ur-Nammu, we see the embodiment of the characteristics that would empower a select, elite group of men to govern over all others and to hold them accountable before their fellow men for violations of agreed-upon behavioral conditions. In short, we see the formation of the patterns of “society” that have held relatively constant for more than four millennia. We see, in real-time, the construction and ratification of that which the Enlightenment thinkers would, some 3700 years later, call “the social contract.”

In a 1994 article for Commentary magazine, James Q. Wilson, among the preeminent American political scientists, noted pithily that “There are only two restraints on behavior—morality, enforced by individual conscience or social rebuke, and law, enforced by police and the courts.” For most of man’s civilized history, the gap between the two—morality and law—has been no greater than a hair’s breadth. Thus it was in Ur, and thus would it be right up to our own “modern” era, when the aforementioned social contract was created specifically to provide moral justification for the law, independent of religion, a justification that was previously rarely contemplated.

As Nietzsche famously noted, the Enlightenment (and its social contract) killed God. As a result, in the nearly three centuries since, society has increasingly been forced to rely on the power of the law alone to restrain man’s behavior. As God’s murder became more and more apparent, and as man grew better able to ignore his conscience, societies became progressively centralized and statist—out of necessity.

But that was not the end of the destruction.

Beginning in the Progressive Era and accelerating in the social revolution of the 1960s, even the law became expendable in governing man’s behavior. Western societies abandoned the bedrock principle of equality under the law and sought to use the state and its legal system to right historical wrongs. Terms and practices like social justice, distributive justice, and restorative justice came to dominate “enlightened” legal thinking and to alter the ability of the law to exert the influence necessary to restrain man’s behavior and keep society functional.

Critics note that Iryna Zarutska’s killer had been arrested and released 14 times. This is because of the efforts made by advocates of social justice and affiliated theories over the last half-century-plus. And her murder is the result.

Long story short: over the course of the last three centuries, Western man has been slowly but surely undoing the very features that enabled societies to exist and civilizations to grow and thrive. Neither Charlie Kirk’s assassin nor his online fans and political supporters are subject to the behavior-leavening power of morality and conscience. Neither Iryna Zariutska’s murder nor his defenders are subject to the limits of the law.

No matter how strong and prepared a man is, he cannot survive in close quarters with hundreds, thousands, or millions of others without rules. And the rules have been purposefully and continually undermined. Society is dying. Unless it is consciously rebuilt, chaos will reign. And Charlie and Iryna will hardly be the last.