I'm sure you are all happy to know that the Seattle shooter is not known to be a member of any terrorist organisation. Clearly that makes it all better, right?

It has become the standard theme of press reporting immediately after a terror incident for the press to look around for the perpetrator's al-Quaeda membership card, and not finding it, to make a point of telling everyone. The only way such a fact can be thought relevant is if you believe that acts of terror committed by apparent free-lancers are somehow less repugnant that if they were committed by card-carrying members of some aggregation of thugs. I get the impression that the point of all this silliness is to try to assert that this is not an act of terrorism. Hogwash!

Politically motivated violence against civilians is terrorism, plain and simple. I really don't care whether the perp has a frequent buyer's card for Honest Achmed's Gun Shop or Jihadland Fertilizer Co. or even Border's. When he commits such an act he's a terrorist.

It is an act of self-destructive denial to try to couch terrorist acts in friendlier terms. I'm not going to participate and I suggest you don't either. Terrorism by any other name would be just as deadly. The difference perhaps is that we will be slower to put a stop to it the more we tolerate the shrouding of these events in cloaks of ambiguity.