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Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who recently joined the Republican primary carnival in an “official” way, says the government should reauthorize the Patriot Act in response to the murder of four Marines in Chattanooga, Tenn., by a 24-year-old gunman.

And he suggested that changing a policy that stops military personnel from carrying weapons in certain civilian areas would have prevented the attack. Those policies “are outdated,” Mr. Walker said on Fox News, because the United States is “at war and radical Islamic terrorism is our enemy.”

After a career criminal who had illegally entered the United States killed a San Francisco woman on July 1, Bill O’Reilly demanded that Congress pass a law that would impose mandatory sentences on people who repeatedly enter the country illegally and members of the right-wing Republican caucus in the House eagerly responded.

The idea was that such a law, along with another proposal to strip cities of federal funds if their police are not required to turn over all undocumented people to the federal government, would prevent shootings like the one in San Francisco.

This leaves me a little confused.

After any highly publicized killing – like the murders in Charleston, or Newtown, or in any number of other places — advocates of gun control call for greater restrictions on the sale and use of firearms. And people on the right, like Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Walker, reliably respond by saying that no law could have prevented those killings.

So, which is it? Can no law stop a determined person from killing another human being? Or can laws do that? It would be inconsistent, if not hypocritical, to take both positions, so there must be some logical explanation.

Mr. Walker and the Fox host Megyn Kelly tut-tutted about the fact that President Obama did not immediately call the Chattanooga killer a Muslim terrorist. They had no idea at the time whether that was true, but the point of the exchange was to attack Mr. Obama. They used it to revive another favorite talking point – that the president did not quickly label the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi as a terrorist attack (even though he actually did).

Oddly enough – or maybe not oddly at all – Mr. Walker called the murder of nine African Americans in a Charleston church a “racist” and “evil” act, but neither he, nor any other Republican candidate or public figure that I can find called it an act of terrorism, which is precisely what it was.

Senator Lindsey Graham, another Republican presidential poser, called it “racial jihadism,” but that was mainly to deflect attention from the real motivations for the murders and toss that “jihad” word out there.

I’m sure there is a logical explanation for that, too.