Finally, one wonders: If the Post is so bothered by the prospect of allowing others to miscast a political position, then why did it fail to clarify its ambiguous line: “He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff.” It couldn’t, perhaps, have hoped to mislead?

Bluntly, I couldn’t care less what the shooter’s politics were, because the chances of his having carried out the attack in service of an ideology are slim to nothing. As usual, the perpetrator seems to have been a disturbed individual who made a terrible decision and then took his own life. But that’s a tragedy, not political news — the domain of straight reporters, not the Sunday-show cognoscenti.

Nevertheless, there is a hideous double standard at play here, and one with which conservatives have every right to be exhausted. Had the words following “very opinionated” been “tea-party member,” “NRA enthusiast,” or even “young Republican,” do we honestly think that the Post would have excised them? Or do we know somewhere — deep down, maybe — that the editors would have bolded them, put them in 90-point font, included them prominently in the headline, and tweeted about them ad nauseam until the end of the year? I know the answer to this — and so do you. And that, I’m afraid, is a problem.