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It’s nice to imagine that these tragic episodes show how “strong” we are. But we’re not.

This conceit of innocence lost and regained and lost again comes from a noble place: we have high expectations of our fellow citizens. And we feel betrayed when those expectations are run down. But there is a blurry line between civic uplift and civic hubris. It’s nice to imagine that these tragic episodes show how “strong” we are. But we’re not. At places where ordinary people congregate, like fast food restaurants and the baseball game, the dominant reaction I’ve heard has been anxious fretting about follow-up attacks. On Twitter, meanwhile, my feed is full of ideologically motivated bickering and point-scoring over Minassian’s alleged motives.

Tribalism is encoded in the human brain. It’s a useful reflex when leaders are rallying the masses to fight foreign invaders, or root out a real force of fifth columnists. But it can misfire badly when spasms of carnage are authored by random loons — because there’s no foe to fight, just bodies to bury. The perverse result is a tendency to artificially inflate the historical importance of emotionally disturbed killers — reimagining them as supervillains, or as disciples of an insidious exterminationist force lurking in every nook and cranny of our society.

Photo by Galit Rodan/CP

As part of the usual post-slaughter drill, ideologues routinely scrutinize a killer’s social-media babblings as a means to support their own pre-existing political beliefs. Just as many Canadian conservatives treated Parliament Hill killer Michael Zehaf-Bibeau as a one-man vanguard for a coming Islamist insurgency, social media this week was afire with claims that Minassian is a men’s-rights culture warrior channelling a cult of toxic misogyny. It all reminds me of the hysterics who responded to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre by insisting that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were goth occultists and “Trench Coat Mafia” members waging a terrorist war on jocks and Christians.

The truth is that those who know Minassian describe him as an anti-social loner who has “special needs.” By one account, he would appear in school hallways, “making meowing noises and hugging his arms around himself.” A military recruit who met Minassian during the latter’s brief, unsuccessful training stint with the Canadian Forces believes he had “some sort of condition.” These facts are highly inconvenient to anyone seeking to turn the man into the #MeToo equivalent of Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik.