Shadowy bands of killers continue to wipe out entire families in attacks on isolated communities in western Algeria.
But it was in Liberia, as a rebel leader and then as president, that his juvenile bands of killers first began to roam in the 1990s, a military model that was then exported across the border.
Organised bands of killers have not engaged in large scale massacres of the opposing groups.
Action against Boko Haram and ISIS would be more on the order of a police action, an effort to shut down bloody-minded bands of killers operating in a lawless corner of the world.
In a way, certain chapters of this conflict have unfolded like a bad script, since so many times, when Mr. Kony and his band of killers have been surrounded in the bush, facing superior firepower, with the credits about to roll, he escapes.
Mr Libbi's arrest, which came on the heels of another counter-terrorism triumph last month, when Saudi police killed a Moroccan member, Karim Mejjati, who has been implicated in atrocities in Morocco and Saudi Arabia, begged a question: how big a threat does Osama bin Laden's band of killers remain?Operationally, not very, conventional spook wisdom suggested.
Gourevitch describes how Rusesabagina spent his days buying lives of Tutsis with liquor, reasoning, persuading, so that each band of killers who came to the hotel to take out various Tutsis on their lists for killing somehow ended up going away.
Wade is accompanied by a band of killers, including a dandified acolyte in buckskins (the gifted Ben Foster) who is fanatically loyal to him, and Crowe separates himself from Foster and the other actors, creating a quiet private space in which he can play.
When the time of battle arrives the "seven" and some of the braver townspeople and farmers go head to head against Bogue and his hired band of killers.
Whether the perpetrators of the San Bernardino shootings are foreign or domestic terrorists, disgruntled employees or a simply a band of killers shouldn't distract us from the inescapable, unacceptable trend of gun violence.
Superheroes, of course, still churned out in installments by the busy factories at Marvel and D.C. Also, newer sci-fi and fantasy series like "Y: The Last Man," about literally the last man on earth (the rest died in a plague), who is now pursued by a band of killer lesbians.
