The statement closes by referencing an incel extremist ideologue, Elliot Rodger, who penned a 141-page, 100,000-word manifesto about his sexual deprivation and the evils of women before embarking on his own violent spree in 2014, leaving six victims dead and more than a dozen wounded. Minassian’s statement may be brief, but it incorporates complexity from other sources.

A Facebook post that said “The ISIS Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the kaffir! All hail Abu Bakr al Baghdadi!” would have produced a very different conversation. For some people, terrorism can only be carried out by certain groups, such as Muslims. For others, disturbingly, hate and violence toward women is somehow a less important crime.

This is the soft bigotry in selective outrage. After I tweeted my view that the attack was terrorism, a number of people responded negatively, referring to Minassian dismissively as someone who was “simply” mentally ill or “an obviously troubled guy.” Some cited Minassian’s alleged autism, despite the fact autism is not credibly linked to violence.

Even if mental-health issues contributed to the attack, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t terrorism. While there are rare situations in which someone can be so unmoored from reality that their stated motive is irrelevant, there is little to suggest that is the case here (again, with the important caveat that the investigation remains in its early stages). The definition of terrorism does not contain an exemption for mental illness. In some cases, where the perpetrator is profoundly incapable of understanding the context of the act, it’s possible to mount an argument that a particular incident should be excluded. But such cases are extraordinarily rare.

This week’s bloodshed was certainly not the beginning of this debate. Recent years have seen a significant number of ambiguous mass killings, including shootings and vehicular attacks likely emulating ISIS and al Qaeda tactics. In many of these cases, the question of terrorism was unclear, or only became clear over time.

In 2012, a white-supremacist skinhead massacred six people at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. He was clearly an extremist, but he left no clues or insights into the motive for his attack. It is probably correct to classify this incident as terrorism or a hate crime. But it’s difficult to be definitive, because he didn’t tell us in explicit terms. Terrorism is about sending messages, and if there’s no clear message, we are left with questions.

Some attacks raise questions that cannot be answered in the heat of a breaking-news cycle. In the case of the San Bernardino shooting, which killed 14 in 2015, it took weeks for elements of the attack to become clear. The initial shooting was carried out in the suspects’ workplace and targeted their coworkers, which is extremely abnormal for a terrorist attack. Their subsequent plans were foiled by law enforcement before they could be carried out. It took months to resolve whether or not Tashfeen Malik, one of the husband-wife shooters, had posted a pledge of allegiance to ISIS on Facebook around the time of the attack. It turned out that she had, and despite the unusual features of the attack, it is now considered terrorism.