And the death toll? We have apparently gotten inured to casualty totals approaching 100, so why not bump-stock that up to 100,000? Because that’s what our new Trump-era energy policy is likely to give us. Fifty-thousand dead here, and 50,000 dead there, and pretty soon you’re talking about a real tragedy. Except we’re not talking about it.

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One of the strange aspects to coverage of mass shootings is the peculiar obsession about finding the “motive.” This piece of analysis makes sense in ordinary crimes, but when you are engaged in killing large numbers of people whom you don’t even know, ordinary motives do not apply. President Trump stumbled into one correct fragment of thought when he said that a mass shooting is a mental health issue. And he should know. But he was dead wrong when he said it wasn’t also a weapons issue. It’s very hard to kill a lot of people at a time with ordinary weapons. Just as it takes some truly epic dirty burning and colossal absence of sanity to increase the number of deaths by 100,000.

Unlike mass shootings, killing people with bad climate policy at least has one apparent motive: A few people stand to make a very large amount of money. But willingness to make your money in this way is not sane. It is slow-motion murder. And the people who are advocating for this path, when we were already on a better path, should be called out for what they are actually up to.