Orlando Shows Us Our Very Scary Future

“I will say one thing,” Kevin Drum writes about the tragedy in Orlando. “There is a big difference between an attack coordinated and carried out by a foe (Pearl Harbor, Pan Am 103, 9/11, Paris, etc.) and an attack by a lunatic who was inspired by something or other (fame, hatred of blacks, Islamist ideology, etc.). The former is either terrorism or an act of war and the latter is an act of psychosis -- and while it may be politically handy to conflate the two, it does nothing to fight either one.”

I understand his point, and it’s not wrong. When such atrocities occur, there is a tendency on both sides of the political spectrum to try to shoehorn people who are just sort of crazy into membership of a group they are worried about in order to inflate the threat and get other people interested in stopping it. Often you really have to grease that shoehorn in order to make the description kinda-sorta fit. This clouds the discussion instead of improving it.