If it seems to happen every other month, then the other month rolls around again, bringing another major gun atrocity in the US — this time in a gay nightclub in Orlando. As ever, the unavoidable shock and horror of the carnage, the deep sadness and pity for the helpless victims, then outrage at the callousness and brutality of the attacker, then the media crisis management campaign and the certain knowledge that, sooner or later, it will happen again. This time around the perpetrator was a lone gunman; the time before that it was a couple attacking a work party, The time before that, another lone gunman attacking a church. The time before that, a lone gunman in a movie theature. And that’s just the recent massacres in the United States, the ones that make the news because whites and first worlders are amongst the victims.
As in the San Bernadino, the killer, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to Islamic State, a group with whom he was suspect of having contact but whom multiple investigations by the FBI cleared of terrorist affiliations. Did that mean he was really looking to carry out a terrorist act, or did he do so as an afterthought, 20 minutes into his killing spree, in order to give his sordid hate crime the pretense of some higher purpose? Having been a security guard for nine years, the idea that he had any Radical Islamist allegiances seems unlikely, since he was working for G4S, formerly known as the formerly the Wackenhut Corporation — a conglomerate not