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Notes -
As far as I know, the anarchist attacks of the late 19th Century were not randomised at all, but targeted precise members of the existing power structures - royals, police chiefs, ministers, etc. They might have had a psychotic/romantic component to them, but they had a vaguely coherent moral system of who deserved to be the target of violence - can you name an anarchist attack in which someone stabbed a random child that just happened to be there? I think throwing a hand grenade at the Tsar's carriage and stabbing a group of kindergarteners is not comparable in the slightest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_violence#Notable_actions
Here's a pretty good survey of anarchist violence, you'll notice that the choice of targets is precise and systematic.
Interesting to note that even when anarchist violence was more "randomised", it still focused on bourgeois institutions and symbols like the Opera and established coffeehouses with wealthy patrons. I really think the comparison to these recent sprees doesn't hold up well.
There is a difference, but I see I did not argue why I felt there is a similarity.
Anarchists / left-wing radicals came up with shared narrative justifying their attacks and selection of targets. However, most of time the attacks did not achieve the goals the narrative purported to they should have achieved. I think they were often motivated by the hate of bourgeois symbols, and embraced a narrative which claimed that killing bourgeois symbols would achieve something and provided validation for what they wanted to do. ETA: But the narrative failed to materialize. Their "systematic" thinking was not reality-based, so was it systematic at all?
I believe car attackers (or school shooters, or other lone wolfs) also have an internal narrative what they are doing makes sense to them, hating the people they kill if for nothing else when planning it and then doing it. The difference is that the "shared" aspect of the "shared narrative" is becoming increasingly lacking, that I acknowledge as the new development.
I was particularly thinking of Edward Oxford, who had no clearly defined political ideology at all. He decided to buy guns, practice shooting and take a shot at Queen Victoria because ... uh, he had become unemployed and felt like inventing a romantic revolutionary terrorist organization consisting solely of himself? How far personality-wise he was from Gavrilo Princip, a school dropout rejected from army whose assassination plot almost failed but set in motion of events that resulted in creation of Yugoslavia ... which he nominally wanted, but I doubt WW1 was the path he was envisioning.
I think Princip's motivations and actions were totally coherent and well-directed (he might not have imagined WW1, but the step-by-step consequences of his attack were exactly what he and the rest of the Black Hand had hoped for) and don't really fit our descriptor - I do agree about the "internal narrative" and I think that's an important component, that these sprees somehow make sense to the people committing them, no matter how wanton they seem from the outside.
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