In a way, all purposeful killing is created equal

Mass murdering is a contagious act, and there’s an outbreak now. More and more men of the sort who once would have lived out isolated and unhappy lives or perhaps chosen to end them are now finding inspiration to unleash their tumultuous unhappiness violently outward.

The murderers’ reasons can be hard to track as fresh new horrors compete for our attention, but other prospective murderers and supporters of those murderers’ supposed causes are keeping count.

To some of these murderers, ideology matters. To others, it’s an alibi. To others still, it’s of no consequence. The rest of us, including law enforcement, need to take care not to promote mad and murderous causes at a time when a handsome young bomber can land the cover of the Rolling Stone.

There are murderers who are true believers, like the Pulse nightclub shooter who called 911 in the midst of murdering 49 people to run down his fanboy knowledge of ISIS, or the white separatist shooter who murdered nine African-American churchgoers.

Murderers who latch on to a cause, like the bisexual hustler who used a truck to kill 84 people in France in the name of ISIS.

Murderers who flirt with causes but have not tied their murdering to them, like the “sovereign citizen” who’d demanded to see President Trump at the White House not long before murdering four African Americans at a Waffle House, or the Parkland school shooter, who murdered 17 students and teachers after privately expressing racist views.

Murderers who just aim to murder more people than the murderers who came before them, like the Sandy Hook shooter who killed 20 children and six adults.

And murderers who take pains to conceal their motive, like the Las Vegas shooter who murdered 59 people.

All that makes no difference for the people who were murdered. Dead is dead. Which is why I’m skeptical of the answer offered by J.M. Berger in an admirable Atlantic essay on “The Difference Between a Killer and a Terrorist.”

In it, Berger defines terrorism as “public violence to advance a political, social or religious cause or ideology,” and says the Toronto murder appears to be an act of terror, while the Waffle House murder does not.

Defining the terms we toss around is essential, and the harder I try to define “terror,” the more I think we might want to finally retire the term along with our wars on it. A word that would give special recognition to a pantsless murderer who thought Taylor Swift was stalking him if he’d scrawled a screed about it does more to confuse than to clarify.

“The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” read the message the latest murderer appears to have posted on Facebook minutes before using a van to murder 10 people and injure more than a dozen others unlucky enough to be on the wrong stretch of sidewalk in Toronto.

Incels, if you’re lucky enough not to know about them, are a self-identified group of men who are “involuntarily celibate,” and often very angry at women about it. Which is nothing new, but is taking a very different form online as these frustrated men find one another and — rather than find a separate outlet to or answer for their sex “problem” — form communities based on their resentments.

One in which others who have murdered in the name of those resentments are frequently praised.

It can be hard to tell how sincere or serious people in various dark, dank and crowded mole tunnels online are in praising the young man who murdered six people in 2014 to avenge himself on a world where women sexually frustrated him — at least until one of them goes up into the real-world light and kills for the cause, such as it is, or just for the lulz. The murder tactic in Toronto — death by vehicle, which requires little skill or training or organization — has spread in the last few years from Israel across the globe, including in Manhattan on Halloween Day when an ISIS devotee murdered eight in the deadliest mass kililng in New York since 9/11.

It has proven so effective that the danger for ISIS, as it encourages sympathizers to use vans or trucks to kill for the cause, may be that others begin using it for other causes, or just to kill — so that it becomes just another terrible but ordinary enough crime rather than a sort of signature.

The danger for the rest of us is just what we all think about sometimes on the train or at the office or the grocery or the bar. That might be time better spent defining our fears, and what measures might be worth it to help protect us from them.

It may be time to retire ‘terrorism’ as a term