It’s not been 48 hours since the massacre in Las Vegas, and the political fight is in full swing. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, so long as the basic duties of respect and accuracy are fulfilled. People have different ideas about how best to respond, and these need to be thrashed out. There are, however, good and bad political arguments. One shortcut to the latter is to make eye-catching but glib comparisons.

“Odd that the same people who say ‘carry on as normal’ after every Islamic terror attacking are suddenly demanding new laws after Las Vegas,” says the alt-right luminary Paul Joseph Watson, editor-at-large of Infowars. He’s referring to the calls for gun control that follow each new mass shooting (never mind that many of these are made, heartbreakingly, by the parents of victims). The Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, was able to buy the weapons he used entirely legally.

Is Watson right? If you believe the best response to jihadist terrorism is to carry on as normal, is it hypocritical to demand restrictions on gun ownership? Surely cool heads should prevail in both cases.

He’s not right, and here’s why. Watson is failing to compare like with like. The neat yoking together of responses to “Islamic terror” and “Las Vegas” makes for a good tweet (one that has been liked more than 22,000 times), but it bears no resemblance to reality.

The calls to “carry on as normal” after terror attacks, such as the ones near my home in London, or in Barcelona or Marseille, are about how we conduct ourselves in the aftermath of an atrocity. Terrorism is a story in two acts: first, there is the murder, then there is the mayhem and fear. Terrorists themselves are responsible for the former. Their appalling trick is that the latter is mediated by our own thoughts and actions, often after the perpetrators themselves are dead.

Groups like Isis positively rely on the amplification of their message of fear – an amplification assisted by commentators such as Watson and Katie Hopkins, who pop up like clockwork after each massacre , ratcheting up fear and intercommunal hostility. This kind of behaviour acts as a force multiplier for the jihadists’ work. Those who engage in it are helping the terrorists on their way (I want to say unwittingly, but it’s not like they haven’t been told).

The game is difficult to withdraw from completely, but its effects can be dampened down. The media have a responsibilty to report events. But they can do so soberly, accurately and without feeding speculation or panic. Government must discharge its primary duty of keeping its citizens safe, through intelligence collection and law enforcement. (This duty also applies to citizens who might be the target of misguided “retaliation”. They must be protected, and should not face additional harassment or discrimination.) Each one of us can choose in our own lives whether to be part of the amplification effect, or the dampening. I know where I like to direct my efforts.

The calls for gun control are categorically different. For a start, they don’t amplify the effects of the mass shooting. And while they are reiterated each time there is a new incident, they are the product of careful prior thinking about how changes in policy could prevent gun violence (international comparisons show that high levels of legal ownership in the US are largely responsible for the shocking death rate there).

If there is an analogy to be made, it’s between these calls and attempts to address the root causes of jihadist terrorism. I don’t know anyone who argues that we should simply “carry on as normal” as far as prevention is concerned. There are undoubtedly policy changes to be made that would help minimise the likelihood of future terror attacks (of course there are differences of opinion as to what these should be). For example, a different foreign policy could have avoided creating safe spaces for terrorists to train, and grievances that make it easier for them to recruit.

Like so much of his output, when you subject it to closer inspection, Watson’s argument falls apart. That’s partly because of his penchant for spurious comparison.

It must be catching, because, hot on his heels, the failed British political strategist Steve Hilton took to Twitter to argue that Hillary Clinton’s call to “stand up to the NRA” was “the EXACT equivalent of calling for a ‘complete and total shutdown’ of Muslim immigration hours after an Islamist terror attack”. The caps are helpful because they draw attention to precisely that part of the tweet that is wrong.

There are, by definition, no exact equivalents in this world: to be exactly equivalent to something is to be that something. What Hilton really means is there’s a way of looking at Clinton’s tweet that serves his pro-gun lobby argument. Good for him. The rest of us should feel free to disagree.