In the wake of tragedy, the entire country, it seems, waits for the
President to say the word. The word is “terrorism.” Following the mass shooting in Las Vegas, the singer Ariana Grande, among countless others, demanded in a tweet that
Trump “call this what it is.” After the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August, reporters got in a shouting match with the President in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan, demanding that he call
the murder of Heather Heyer an act of terrorism. The longing is almost
palpable—as though by saying the word, this President, who seems capable
of experiencing neither human empathy nor political responsibility, will
finally at least acknowledge painful reality.

But, the reality is, the Las Vegas shooting—at least as far as we know now—was not an act of terrorism. Nor was the killing in Charlottesville.
There is no single definition of terrorism, but most scholars agree on
several broad criteria. The Irish political scientist Louise Richardson,
who now serves as the vice-chancellor at Oxford, has set out seven key
characteristics of a terrorist act: it is politically inspired; it
involves violence or the threat of violence; it aims to send a message
rather than defeat an enemy; the act and the victim have symbolic
significance; the act is carried out by “substate groups” rather than
state actors; the victims of the violence are distinct from the audience
for which the terrorist’s message is intended; and the act deliberately
targets civilians. The F.B.I. uses a much less precise definition of terrorism, but it, too, specifies that the perpetrator must be
pursuing a political objective.

So far, no evidence has emerged that the Las Vegas shooter was motivated
by political beliefs. The Charlottesville killer was, but he attacked
his opponent directly: the victim and audience of the murder were one
and the same. It was a politically motivated killing, but it was not
terrorism.

Of course, “terrorism” is much more than a descriptive term that should
be used in accordance with the definition dictated by a political
scientist. Terrorism—or, rather, the war on terrorism—is a defining
force of American political reality, and has been for sixteen years.
This is precisely why the word seems so important, and so called for, in
moments of national pain, fear, and horror.

Among other things, the war on terrorism has created a separate category
of law enforcement in this country. Defendants in terrorism cases are
treated as enemies rather than criminals. Prosecutors employ war
rhetoric against them, and judges follow special sentencing guidelines
in deciding their fate. Special isolation cells, entire special
facilities, and special rules of imprisonment are used for inmates
facing terrorism charges. According to a 2014 report by Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute,
nearly a third of these defendants were victims of entrapment, and the
entrapment was fuelled by ethnic and religious profiling. Most of these
defendants are Muslim, usually brown, often immigrants.

Demands that Trump apply the term “terrorism” to the Las Vegas shooting
or the Charlottesville murder are attempts to assert something that
should be obvious: armed white men pose a statistically greater threat
to the safety and security of Americans than do Muslims, immigrants, or
even Islamic militants. An even more obvious point is that people killed
by a brown man, as during the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, are
just as dead as people killed by a white man during a country-music concert in Las Vegas, and that eyewitnesses and many others are just as
terrorized.

The argument confuses cause and effect. The fact that people are
terrorized doesn’t necessarily mean that an act of terror has been
committed. This matters, because language matters. When terms are used too broadly, or just sloppily, they lose their meaning.

Perhaps more important, consider the potential consequences of
broadening the use of the term “terrorism” to include white men who
express generalized rage by firing the guns so easily available to them. More people, potentially, would be subjected to entrapment, inflated sentences, and torture conditions—hardly a desirable outcome, even if
the injustice would be spread a little more fairly. Worse, these killers
would get to enjoy an entirely different profile after committing their
crimes.

Part of the appeal of claiming an affiliation with, say, ISIS, is that
it automatically raises a potential terrorist from thug to enemy
combatant. When I was covering the Boston Marathon bombing trial, in
2014, I lost track of the number of times the assistant district
attorney said the phrase “They attacked us”—meaning, the Tsarnaev
brothers attacked America. In fact, though, they didn’t “attack us”:
they killed people at random. That heinous act, whether committed by a
Muslim in Boston or a (presumed) Christian in Las Vegas, should not be
glorified as an act of war.

We fight terrorism all wrong. We elevate the accused terrorist and
proceed to destroy him. Turning the inhumane, illogical, and often
extralegal weapons of this war against yet more enemies would serve only
to degrade our legal and political culture further. It may also heighten
the appeal of senseless violence, by imbuing it with meaning.

The act of ascribing meaning is reassuring for the public, too. Calling
an attack “terrorism” helps to distance it, by placing it in an
intelligible category and helping to imagine the perpetrator as a
superhuman monster. Viewing him as a regular person who needs no
particular beliefs, affiliation, or label—or even a gun license—to kill
dozens of people makes us feel utterly defenseless. We are.