I stare at photos of the young dead.

You can see the happiness of 18-year-old Reese Fallon who was about to embark on an exciting adult life but she was shot to death. Ten-year-old Julianna Kozis, impossibly charming, was a little shy but smiled with complete trust at the person behind the camera. A bullet or bullets broke her small compact swimmer’s body.

They had happy lives until the terrible coincidental moment they were seen by a man out to kill.

The girls were on the Danforth that evening, thrilled to be there, and now they have vanished forever. I’m grateful to the crowd of good people who walked along the street on Wednesday as part of the effort to reclaim the normal ease of the street. I wonder if the injured, many still in hospital, will feel able to return.

But it troubles me that Reese and little Julianna were not necessarily the focus of the city’s distress. The attention swung immediately to the gunman.

By the way, he was not a “shooter.” The American slang for their many mass killers is as usual, childish, like “pea shooter.” No. He was a man with a gun. Killers almost always are.

Read more:

Public visitation held for Danforth shooting victim Reese Fallon

Danforth shooting victim Reese Fallon’s family says she won’t be forgotten

‘You have to keep living your life’: Survivors of the Yonge St. van attack send comfort to the Danforth

Thanks to a statement phrased in general terms by a well-meaning family friend, many observers made unreliable assumptions. Psychosis? Depression? These are general labels for particular types of mental distress and are insufficient to explain a massacre. Because the SIU is still studying the case, the police can tell us almost nothing about the gunman.

Maybe Faisal Hussain, 29, aimed to copy the Yonge St. van attack, but didn’t have a driver’s licence. Maybe he used a gun from home.

It is a vast leap to say that mental illness caused Hussain to walk casually along the Danforth selecting his victims. We don’t know. As the Star’s Amy Dempsey reports, murders by the seriously mentally ill are rare. In the cases she has seen, they or their family tried to get medical help and failed.

But there are killers — hospital serial killers are one example — who know precisely what they’re doing. Hussain may have been what Joyce Carol Oates calls an isolato, an isolated person out of step with the times or culture. The word chills.

After the slaughter, the usual commentators veered into the same old tribal tunnels, with identity politics as unhelpful as ever. Hard-left activists complained that murders on the pleasant Danforth got more attention than gang murders in high-crime neighbourhoods. This is a little like the heartless, tasteless complaint that the dead on the Humboldt hockey team bus got more attention because they were young, white males.

The extreme-right made unwarranted — and I say racist — assumptions about the killer’s religion and a possible link — it seems highly unlikely — to Daesh, but that’s the canyon they camp in.

How wonderful to see so many people back a Toronto gun or ammunition ban. But the hard left complained that police scouring for handguns would mean “conservative outcomes” with racialized arrests and jail terms. No. Trafficking in illegal handguns — as Hussain’s brother, Fahad, is alleged to have done — is a choice made by anyone of any race.

But the hard-left and the hard-right converged on one thing. Julianna and Reese went almost unmentioned, as did the two little girls shot in a Scarborough playground recently.

The difference between the right and left is the choice of victim. The hard-left says the killer is a victim, the hard-right blames race. What they have in common is that the actual victims, the dead and injured, are ancillary.

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Gun regulations are a model of Canadian naivete. Here’s one question on the RCMP’s gun licence application. “During the past five years, have you threatened or attempted suicide, or have you suffered from or been diagnosed or treated by a medical practitioner for: depression; alcohol, drug or substance abuse; behavioural problems; or emotional problems?”

A man determined to get a gun might lie. But an isolato wouldn’t because he doesn’t consider himself deranged. We can ask better questions.

Let’s ban guns or ammunition in Toronto. Let’s rid ourselves of this hideous American metal infection, this thanatos, this drive to death.