Cambridge, Massachusetts is one my favourite places in the world. I visited for a few days in 2010, and something about the place stuck with me – it happened to be undergoing an unseasonal warm spell, for one thing, but being a keen Gap Year student, it probably also appeared to confirm my dreams about what university life would be – students sitting under sun-dappled trees reading books in Harvard Yard, museums stuffed with the latest gadgetry at MIT, coffee shops full of earnest young radicals handing out leaflets and debating the future of Marxism in the 21st Century. It would take its namesake across the Atlantic to disabuse me of that sunny American Dream.

It was a shock to discover that the apparent perpetrators of the Boston bombings are Cantabrigians, then. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev lived in Cambridge for 10 years, went to the same school as Ben Affleck and e.e. Cummings, and seemingly participated in American life without incident, taking full advantage of the extra-curricular opportunities that one could expect from a wealthy university town in North America. And somehow, amongst one of the most idyllic settings in the country, they accumulated enough rage to set off bombs that would dismember citizens just as they neared the finish line of a run to raise money for cancer victims.

God knows why. And perhaps we need not go looking for a reason. From the biographical detail we have on these bombers, there seems to be no exceptional hardship, no traumatic experience too far out of the ordinary, and as of the time of writing, the younger Dzhokhar didn’t even seem to have been radicalised at all. One classmate chillingly recalls: “He wasn't 'them'. He was 'us'. He was Cambridge”. While the media speculation about Islamist cells infiltrating the US continues, as Congressmen attempt to shoehorn the atrocity into an attempt to derail sensible immigration reform, I find myself wanting to give a Victorian response to it all: some people just go mad.

There’s a strong part of me that doesn’t want to give these people the credit to look into their history and find out their grievances. By bringing the country to a grinding halt, saturating media coverage and getting everybody to breathlessly discuss the aims and methods of jihadism, these two pathetic little men have as good as succeeded in their desperate need for attention and respect. If I had my way, I would deny them that satisfaction. I have no interest in differentiating their goals from Breivik or Cho or Lanza or any other murderous nutcase with a grudge against the world. I would enforce a rule that no matter the body count, every such random act of carnage was pushed right down the news bulletins and the perpetrators could only be referred to as “awful little shits”.

To let ourselves be surprised when a few individuals go utterly defective will leave us endlessly traumatised. We cannot ignore terrorists and psychopaths any more than we can avoid jumping when someone shouts “boo!”. But the jump must be the most they get out of us.