Two died and five were injured in Copenhagen on Saturday in two Islamist attacks, the first on a free speech debate and the second on the Danish capital’s largest synagogue. In a world accustomed to mass casualties, those figures don’t get across the drama of what happened. The audio recording of the first attack, however, does.

Shortly before 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, 22-year-old Omar al-Hussein fired 40 shots through the window of Krudttonden (culture center) in Copenhagen. He killed documentary filmmaker Finn Norgaard and wounded three police officers, though his presumed target, Lars Vilks, an artist who has drawn cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, got away.

Hussein also got away. A few hours later, at 1 a.m. Sunday morning, he arrived at a bat mitzvah party at Copenhagen’s main synagogue, where he shot dead Dan Uzan, an economist who was volunteering as a security guard. Another two police officers were wounded.

Around 5 a.m., Hussein arrived back at his home. The police were waiting for him, and he died in the ensuing shootout.

The attacks have had a big impact in Denmark, and even across Scandinavia. By 1 p.m. Monday, over 16,000 people had registered to attend a memorial service for the victims in Copenhagen scheduled for 8 p.m. that evening—so many registered that the organizers had to change the venue. Memorial services will also be held in five other cities. Meanwhile in Stockholm, well-wishers have been leaving messages of support on orange hearts on the Danish Embassy.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this attack is its simplicity. There was no diabolical genius working through a master plan. There wasn’t even a group of conspirators—the other men arrested so far appear to be Hussein’s weapons’ suppliers rather than partners in crime. There wasn’t even an improvised explosive device or other slightly complex weapon that requires skill and training to assemble. Instead there was a fairly average, ordinary man who got a gun and fired it through a window into a room full of people. The world is full of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of similar young men with the same capacity and intent.

How do you defend against that? You cannot station armed police outside every coffee shop in Europe.

It is a dilemma that Stratfor chairman George Friedman discussed powerfully after the Charlie Hebdo attack last month:

Enough Muslims share that fervency to endanger the lives of those they despise, and this tendency toward violence cannot be tolerated by either their Western targets or by Muslims who refuse to subscribe to a jihadist ideology. And there is no way to distinguish those who might kill from those who won’t. The Muslim community might be able to make this distinction, but a 25-year-old European or American policeman cannot. And the Muslims either can’t or won’t police themselves. Therefore, we are left in a state of war. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called this a war on radical Islam. If only they wore uniforms or bore distinctive birthmarks, then fighting only the radical Islamists would not be a problem. But Valls’ distinctions notwithstanding, the world can either accept periodic attacks, or see the entire Muslim community as a potential threat until proven otherwise. These are terrible choices, but history is filled with them. Calling for a war on radical Islamists is like calling for war on the followers of Jean-Paul Sartre. Exactly what do they look like? …Europe’s sense of nation is rooted in shared history, language, ethnicity and, yes, in Christianity or its heir, secularism. Europe has no concept of the nation except for these things, and Muslims share in none of them. It is difficult to imagine another outcome save for another round of ghettoization and deportation. This is repulsive to the European sensibility now, but certainly not alien to European history. Unable to distinguish radical Muslims from other Muslims, Europe will increasingly and unintentionally move in this direction. …We are entering a place that has no solutions. Such a place does have decisions, and all of the choices will be bad. What has to be done will be done, and those who refused to make choices will see themselves as more moral than those who did. There is a war, and like all wars, this one is very different from the last in the way it is prosecuted. But it is war nonetheless, and denying that is denying the obvious.

The attacks of the last couple of months are forcing the affected countries to take the first baby steps toward considering these questions. Danish columnists discuss whether radical Imams should have the freedom of speech to preach hate. France’s Le Figaro hosts a feature on “20 years of Islamist terrorist attacks” and discusses the rising threat of terror across Europe.

Meanwhile in Germany—which has not experienced a major Islamic terrorist attack, though it has had plenty of threats, including one this weekend—the media is more aloof and politically correct. Der Spiegel, for example, published an article on Hussein without mentioning the words “terrorist” or “Islam.” The closest it gets to informing the reader that the shooter was Muslim was when it mentions that “the young man had mostly kept to his Muslim friends.”

Of course there are many in Germany who do not share this rather naive world view, as its recent anti-Islam protests have shown. Nonetheless, the different approaches between victims and those spared shows how just one relatively small attack can change a country. Extremist Muslims show no signs of stopping these attacks, and the West is no closer to making them stop. As Freidman’s cold, logical reasoning shows, these attacks will lead Europe to take a much more antagonistic approach to Islam.

For more on the potential for conflict between Europe and Islam, read Brad Macdonald’s article “Catholic Europe vs. Islamic Hordes: Round 2.”