I had almost forgotten about this. Not like “I don’t remember” but in the sense of it “had been so long, I hadn’t thought about it in years”.

The self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army and its shootout with Los Angeles police in 1974.

But it came back to me, today, while watching, off and on, the seven-or-so hours of the Saint-Denis Raid, in the Paris suburb of the same name, where French authorities cornered and killed the violent little man who apparently organized the terror attacks in Paris five days before.

The parallels between the two incidents are several.

–The violence of the struggle. In each case, heavily armed criminals refused to surrender and fought back against government forces. French authorities suggest 5,000 rounds were exchanged. Back in 1974, the Los Angeles Police Department estimated 9,000 rounds had been fired.

–In each case, the criminals were led by anti-social men with a troubled family background and long histories with law enforcement, and each envisioned overturning the society that raised them, and doing it violently.

–Their time on the run, for the core of both groups, ended in dingy dwellings in a rough part of town. Abdulhamid Abaaooud had holed up in a “squat” in working-class Saint-Denis with a woman described as his cousin and a few more confederates, and Donald DeFreeze, the self-styled “Field Marshall Cinque”, met his end in a deteriorating neighborhood in southwest Los Angeles.

–Both groups were committed to the violent overthrow of governments. Abaaoud had spent time in Syria, in territory controlled by the so-called Islamic State, which envisions Islam conquering Europe, and he was able to mobilize at least eight co-religionists to carry out the terror attacks in Paris five days earlier. DeFreeze had done time in prison and was leader of a group that embraced the most fuzzy-headed variety of communism, and they had killed two people, kidnapped a prominent heiress and staged armed robberies. Both leaders and both groups seemed convinced their fantasies would become reality.

Where the stories deviate is that arrests were made in Saint-Denis. Only two were killed — Abaaoud and his cousin, who blew herself up, and half a dozen others were arrested, though it is not clear how many of them were working directly with the dead duo.

The six members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) trapped in Los Angeles all died on the scene. If not fatally shot, they died when the house caught fire and burned to the ground.

If you didn’t live through the America of the late 1960s and early 1970s, you may not know that weirdness of the SLA sort, a handful of outcasts going off to overthrow the government, was in the air.

In 1969, Charles Manson and his followers killed nine people as they attempted to set off a race war that would bring down the U.S. government. The Black Panthers also were operating.

At the time, the deaths of the SLA members, in 1974, did not feel like the end of an American era, in a broader social sense.

But looking back, that was it, for violent fringe groups with senseless ideologies and plans to overturn the U.S. government.

We can only hope that the Islamic State attacks also indicate that the end is near for outsiders of their ilk. Public revulsion was so strong, in 1974, that the idea of a “popular” violent uprising became unthinkable. Could that be the case for terrorists of the modern age?

Of course, the Symbionese Liberation Army never had “home territory” behind them, to retreat to or to look to for guidance of funding. Waiting for the killers of the Islamic State to fade away may require more patience.