In addition to the inevitable abortion politicking, the murderous rampage of Robert Dear at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado has inspired a number of writers to contrast the stiff upper lip with which many Americans seem to handle the general prevalence of gun violence on our shores with the highly-politicized anxiety surrounding the acts that we decide to call “terrorism.” This contrast is widely invoked as evidence of American xenophobia: We fear attacks from a nebulous or specifically-Islamic “Other” more than we fear violence by angry white men, it’s alleged, even if the Other isn’t likely to hurt us nearly as much as a bunch of heavily-armed heartlanders, because Americans still identify with whiteness/maleness/Christianity too closely to fully imagine “white Christian terrorism” as something to be feared.

This is a mostly left-wing argument. But even as evenhanded an observer of our politics as Tyler Cowen basically comes around to the conclusion that the public’s distinctive fear of terrorism — as opposed to a fear of violent death in all its varied forms — is a mixture of dubious foreign policy reasoning (in which vulnerability to Paris-style attacks is seen as a proxy for general weakness) and, well, deeply-rooted xenophobia: “Due to our heritage as African primates, we are programmed to fear violent attacks by outsiders more than we actually need to today.”

Now I too think that Westerners and Americans have a somewhat exaggerated fear of terrorism, and there’s no doubt that a certain kind of xenophobia enters into that equation somewhere. But there’s also something important missing in the comparison between a lot of the highly individual cases (Dear’s included, it would seem) that people want to label “right-wing domestic terrorism” these days and the kind of cases that involve an organized conspiracy (whether foreign or domestic) to commit mass murder for political ends.

Part of that difference rests on the obvious point that a conspiracy can, if allowed to spread and plot unchecked, do far more damage than any individual killer with a rifle, whatever his motivations. (You don’t have to go all the way with Dick Cheney’s 1 percent doctrine to see that it would only take one suitcase nuke to overshadow every spree killer that ever lived.)

But there’s a less obvious explanation as well, having to do with the role and purpose and claims of government, for why terrorist conspiracies might really deserve greater scrutiny, greater anxiety, greater fear. Namely, whatever the body count involved, by its very nature a terrorist group doesn’t only threaten individual lives. It also challenges the government’s monopoly on organized force, which is the state’s most basic (at least in social-contract theory) claim and guarantee.

Which is not to say that the government isn’t also responsible for preventing and prosecuting spree killing, or any other form of murder. But it isn’t unreasonable for people to feel less safe, at some level, in a society in which organized factions and networks seem to be plotting murder with impunity than in a society that just has a variable crime rate. Yes, high crime rates eventually degrade public authority and public trust as well. But everyone understands that the government’s monopoly on force doesn’t enable it to protect you from every would-be killer … whereas many people think of organized violence as the first thing that the state is supposed to prevent, pre-empt, forestall. (And here the oft-cited fact that more people are killed in furniture accidents than die at the hands of terrorists is entirely off-point, since nobody — well, almost nobody — thinks that government exists primarily to protect people from poorly-secured bookcases.)

It’s for this reason, this particular fear of conspiracies against the public good, that the Mafia in all its varied forms is understandably seen as an important law enforcement target even though a neighborhood managed by mobsters might technically have a lower murder rate than certain inner-city districts or Appalachian counties. It’s for this reason that people understandably worry about ISIS-abetted radicalization among recent Muslim immigrants even though natives will probably commit murder at higher rates no matter what. And it’s for this reason (to pick a case where my fellow conservatives can be inclined to miss the point) that people in heavily-policed communities understandably regard lawless violence dealt out by police officers as a distinctive problem even though far more of their neighbors are killed by ordinary criminals — because cops are vested with the authority of the state, which makes their corruption and conspiratorial self-protection far more insidious than everyday street crime even if it leave fewer people dead.

None of this means, again, that the public’s specific anxieties about conspiracies and terrorism are necessarily rational. (They call them “conspiracy theories” for a reason.) But there is often a certain kind of rationality, at least, behind the various “scares” that political violence (or the fear of political violence) can provoke. They tend to peak when there seems to be a clear danger that the violence is actually organized, as opposed to just random people popping off, and then diminish once the conspiracy in question is either broken up or proven to be less terrifying and pervasive than once thought.

The “brown scare” over right-wing militias after Oklahoma City and Waco and Ruby Ridge, for instance, was premised not just on the feared existence of many more potential Timothy McVeighs; the great fear was that he was somehow representative of the militia movement as a whole, and that these groups as groups were all homegrown insurrectionists in the making. But by the time this anxiety got the Hollywood treatment, the militia movement was in steep decline, and as it declined so did the public’s anxiety …. until Obama’s first term, that is, when a surge of far-right organizing led to a miniature brown scare on the center-left, which petered out in turn once it became clear that cases like a hanged census worker did not, in fact, reflect any kind of organized right-wing plot. (And likewise in political reverse: The spasm of right-wing anxiety in 2008 about the New Black Panthers was basically a brief flashback to a 1970s-era past when left-wing violence wasn’t just the sporadic work of disturbed loners.)

Similarly with Islamic terrorism: Public anxiety over Islamist terror peaked after 9/11, declined as Al Qaeda’s capabilities seemed to decline or be degraded, and now has spiked again with the rise of ISIS … and it’s hard to miss the crucial role being played by the public’s perceptions of jihadist organization. The Paris massacres have produced a very different reaction than, say, Nidal Hasan’s murderous rampage or even the Boston Marathon Bombing not only because they were larger-scale but because they were more directly connected to a group, a network, a large-scale conspiracy with resources and reach. And whether that reaction leads to sound policy or not, it’s not just a generalized fear of the Other at work; the public clearly regards the threat from Islamist individuals like the Tsarnaevs very differently than it does the threat from a terrorist conspiracy or network or (in the case of ISIS) quasi-state.

And so, finally, to the Colorado clinic attacks and the pro-life movement. There was a time, in the late 1980s and 1990s — the era of aggressive Operation Rescue tactics, pro-life despair over Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and the Army of God’s “defensive action statement” justifying the murder of abortionists — when the anti-abortion movement seemed to be acquiring an organized violent fringe. (Not coincidentally, this was an era when support for the pro-life position hit a post-Roe low.)

But thanks in so small part to the efforts of pro-life leaders, this fringe was pushed out of the movement and ceased to be a meaningful or influential force, and after the 1990s organized violence against abortion clinics went into clear decline. And unless there’s something unexpected to be revealed about Robert Dear, he looks like proof of this trend, not an exception: However much some sort of pro-life idea played into his motivations, he seems to have been a classic disturbed killer, representing nothing larger than his own demons, his madness-haunted self.

Which doesn’t mean there won’t be political fall-out from his wickedness, or that it won’t redound in some sense to Planned Parenthood’s benefit. But I’m skeptical that it will change the politics of abortion very much, or that a left-wing push to make “pro-life terrorism” an issue will get all that far, as long as it remains clear that no pro-life organization is actually connected to his actions.

And that will be reasonable on the terms that most people understand, because when Americans say they’re worried about “terrorism” they don’t have in mind either disturbed gunmen with idiosyncratic grievances or the frightening foreigner in some very generalized xenophobic sense. They’re worried very specifically about terrorist conspiracies, foreign and domestic — about a well-organized and agenda-driven violence that the government seems powerless against. How much weight this fear deserves relative to others is a matter for debate. But the fact that it’s not likely to fasten permanently on today’s pro-life movement is an entirely reasonable thing.