No, it doesn't!

That's one example of common reactions that are irrational and harmful. Insofar as murders like this are meant to sow terror among the public, too many people unwittingly abet the killers, as if our only choice is submitting to a narrative in which we are terrorized. Bloomberg captured this most powerfully, if unwittingly, in an analysis article that was leading Google News soon after the parliament shooting:

Let's unpack what that headline implicitly and explicitly says: 1) For the U.S., the present era is defined by "terror." 2) Due to these attacks, the same is now true for Canada whether it likes it or not. 3) These attacks have caused the whole nation of Canada to "reel," which is to say, to lose one's balance and stagger or lurch violently. "Terror reached Canada this week when a 'radicalized' convert to Islam ran down and killed a soldier," the story begins. "Canada had until now dodged a terror attack even as Prime Minister Stephen Harper and others had warned that the nation, whether from Islamist extremists or lone wolves ... was vulnerable."

This framing elides the choice before Canadians. They need not be "dragged" into an era defined by "terror" as a result of these killings. They need not "reel" from these attacks. They need not unilaterally infringe on their own civil liberties and freedoms.

They can choose to keep these attacks in perspective.

Doing so can be difficult in times of trauma. One feels for Stephen Marche when he writes, in Esquire, "The Canada I believed to be so safe, so secure is gone. All of that was the Canada of my youth. This is Canada now." The way he feels is understandable.

It is also irrational and needs to be understood as such.

The murder of two people does not mark a new era. It does not render one of the word's safest countries unsafe. It does not make one of history's most secure nations insecure. We cannot know the future with certainty, but everything we know about the present and recent past suggests overreacting to these attacks poses a greater threat to Canada than terrorism, much as the Iraq War killed more Americans than 9/11, cost more money than 9/11, and did more to weaken us than 9/11.

The panic that followed 9/11—that most of us felt—was at least informed by the fact that America had never suffered an attack like it. The notion that Canada has just broken with a halcyon past when it was safe from even two murders is historical amnesia.

"This was not the first time Canada’s parliament had been a target, nor was it the biggest terrorist attack in the country’s history," The Economist notes. "An inept bomber intent on killing as many MPs as possible blew himself up in the same building in 1966, and an armed man hijacked a bus and fired shots outside parliament in 1989. The 1985 bombing of an Air India flight to London from Toronto, in which 329 people died, remains the largest terror attack originating in Canada."