The new generation of young loyalist and republican gunmen who shot dead nine people in the past seven weeks are a scary bunch, even by the standards of a society as brutalised as Northern Ireland.
The new gunmen have rejected the old-fashioned quasi-British NCO military structure of the traditional loyalist organisations in favour of a gangsta culture where hip haircuts and street clothes are as important as the guns and killing.
This is also a social group comfortable with mixing patriotism with drug-taking - their leaders supply them with bullets and their ecstasy tablets.
Strangely, the young loyalists still adhere strongly to the martial music traditions and membership of top marching bands is still sought avidly. With the approach of the marching season, the young loyalists will be swapping their designer casual gear for their band uniforms, their boom boxes for fifes and drums.
Their direct counterparts are to be found in the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), the republican faction which shot dead the loyalists' icon, Billy Wright, a sectarian murderer and former drugdealer who attracted in life, and even more so in death, a cult following among the new young breed of loyalists.
Another of their cultural icons is Torrens Knight, the young Ulster Defence Association (UDA) member who at the age of 21 shot dead seven people in the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, Co Derry in October, 1993 in retaliation for the IRA's killing of 10 people in the Shankill Road bombing a week earlier.
In prison, Knight has shifted allegiance to Wright's Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), once a ragbag of non-aligned loyalists but now the organisation of choice for Ulster's new young defenders.
Another of the leading young figures on the outside is another UDA man from the Shankill. He killed his first Catholic - John Slane, whom he shot dead as he helped prepare dinner for his eight children - in March last year. On the run from his paramilitary elders he has found protection and generous support among the young loyalists affiliated to the UDA and the growing LVF. The still-disciplined UVF probably cannot kill him now for fear of creating another martyr.
To this new, expanding group Billy Wright's simple brand of sectarian rhetoric - captured perfectly in the common graffito "All Catholics Are Targets (ACAT)" - suffices in place of any more complicated political direction.
To a great extent the fault for this development within loyalism lies with the men who have claimed leadership of the UDA. After the loyalist ceasefire in October 1994, they continued recruiting young men and training them in firearms, without providing any kind of political education or proper discipline.
The organisation has fallen into moral and military decline since the early 1980s, when the late John McMichael, father of the UDP leader Gary McMichael, made strenuous efforts to improve the standards of its recruits and create an efficient terrorist organisation.
John McMichael actually set up a separate organisation called the Ulster Defence Fighters (UDF) away from the "pubs and clubs" culture of the UDA and selected recruits who showed a measure of political and historical understanding of the loyalist cause as well as a willingness and ability to attack republican targets. He would have shot anyone dabbling in drugs.
Under McMichael the organisation tried to veer away from random sectarian violence and struck at leading republicans - the Sinn Fein leader, Mr Adams, narrowly escaped being killed by one of his units in 1984.
Jim Guiney, the UDA man shot dead by the INLA in his south Belfast carpet shop earlier this week, was one of McMichael's lieutenants. Guiney had long ago ended his military involvement, disillusioned with the organisation and became a close political supporter of his former commander's son, Gary. John McMichael was himself killed by an IRA booby trap bomb under his car in 1987.
The organisation has now fallen back into the hands of the clubs and pubs men.
Unsurprisingly, several of these figures are now heavily involved in drug-dealing in association with Catholic drug-dealers, many of whom are connected with republican paramilitaries like the INLA.