No new terror laws will protect us from a disturbed drug addict interpreting messages on the Internet as commands to go forth and commit murder with a hunting rifle.

Especially one who had been in and out of custody, cleared by a Surrey Pre-Trial Centre psychiatrist and released by a B.C. judge with a (hopefully ironic), “Good luck to you, sir.”

The “Attack on Canada” wasn’t 9/11. Equally scary and equally traumatic in some ways, especially if you were caught anywhere near the Parliament Hill shooting.

But Wednesday’s tragedy exposed not so much a failure of our security forces as the gaping holes in our appallingly frayed social safety net.

Homeless and troubled, Montreal-born Michael Zehaf-Bibeau knew he wasn’t coping, sought assistance, begged from the sounds of it; no one listened closely enough.

During his adult life, we spent a small fortune in two provinces providing the 32-year-old with plenty of “due process” and stretches of free room and board at Her Majesty’s motels.

But we didn’t help him and, if anything, the legal system only exacerbated his frustrations.

The vast amount of tax money devoted to his petty crimes would have been far better spent providing him with appropriate psychiatric and social care.

We have two other nearly identical people sitting in jail awaiting trial accused of attempting a copycat Boston Marathon pressure-cooker bomb attack in Victoria on Canada Day 2013. They, too, seem more sad sack than Satanic.

These incidents are examples not of Muslim extremism but of the lack of community support for the dysfunctional of any faith who, with a lack of proper attention or the wrong catalyst, become dangerous.

Amid the noise and chaos of the Web, is it any wonder they can find inspiration, be it from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, white supremacists or Charlie Manson?

Our police, courts and prisons regularly fail to protect us from the truly menacing even when they have dealt with them.

Who can forget the innocent Metro Vancouver teen murdered so recently by a man labelled a high-risk to rape and kill who was supposedly being “monitored”?

At the same time, the legal authorities fail to separate out those who aren’t so much in need of incarceration as requiring housing, social and psychiatric aid.

That’s partly because they’re not trained or mandated to do that, but also there are few services or enough safe havens for the addled, disturbed or unstable.

Still, instead of being sounded as a wake-up call for more investment in social housing and better support programs, Zehaf-Bibeau’s mad suicidal murder dash is being used as proof we need new surveillance tools — more Big Brother measures.

How would a beefed-up national spying apparatus have helped here? Or address the problem of alienated, emotionally incendiary and often addicted Canadians?

A vagabond committing petty crimes, dulling himself with crack, behaving erratically at a Burnaby mosque, apparently irking even fellow denizens of the Vancouver Salvation Army shelter, Zehaf-Bibeau might as well have taken out a billboard proclaiming “I am in crisis.”

He still wasn’t receiving any help.

This is no fifth column; these people are hiding out in the open.

They alienate their families, they annoy the rest of us, they are labelled anti-social for good reasons.

They are lying asleep on sidewalks in the morning when we go to work and at night they occupy street corners raving about their torments — harmless, usually.

We can change our approach and begin to help them or we can curtail civil liberties and invest in more cops, metal detectors, fences and listening equipment.

I know which approach would make me feel safer, what I would call real security measures: a social safety net that caught those in obvious need before they went postal, people like Zehaf-Bibeau.

imulgrew@vancouversun.com