The Orlando massacre is sickening and frightening. It’s sickening on its face: Dozens of innocent people were shot to death by a remorseless, merciless fanatic on Saturday night, executed for the ‘crime’ of carousing with friends at an establishment that caters to a clientele despised by their killer. It’s frightening because this horror was not perpetrated by masked men shouting slogans in an unfamiliar tongue thousands of miles away. It wasn’t carried out by trained practitioners of terror who hijacked airplanes and targeted symbolic nuclei of American power and wealth. No, like last year’s San Bernardino bloodbath, this atrocity unfolded in a mid-sized American city, at the hands of a young U.S.-born American citizen. Fact will be separated from fiction in the days to come, as details are clarified and leads chased down. What seems to be clear at this stage is that Saturday’s agent of destruction was a radical Islamist, inspired by ISIS and exhorted to action by instructions to murder and maim as many ‘infidels’ as possible, particularly during Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.

In an utterly depressing storm of reactionary blame-casting, self-affirmation and point-scoring, far too many American partisans reacted by turning their grief and fury on one another. Some on the Left immediately applied their prefab gun control template to this act of savagery. The NRA was relentlessly scapegoated, and appalling equivalencies were drawn; one Democratic Senator even called the US Congress “complicit” in the barbarity because it hadn’t passed the sorts of laws he favored. Never mind that the attacker was a US citizen who purchased his firearms legally after passing a background check (despite this, this, and this). Never mind that he also reportedly had an (obviously illegal) explosive device in his possession, and conducted his rampage in a “gun-free zone.” Never mind that the understandable impulse to do something in the face of such unimaginable carnage leads some to a “solution” that would disarm law-abiding innocents, rendering them even more defenseless against maniacs who manifestly have no interest in respecting any laws or regulations. Tight Massachusetts gun control measures did not prevent the Boston bombing, which relied on pressure cookers packed with ball-bearings to destroy and kill. Strict California laws did not stop the San Bernardino shooters from obtaining high-powered weapons or constructing a makeshift bomb. Those are hard truths, but they’re truths nonetheless. Neither the sitting president nor the Democratic nominee to succeed him could bring themselves to call radical Islamist terror by its name — even after the connection was quite clear — in their initial statements on Sunday, yet both managed to invoke gun control slogans.

Meanwhile, some on the Right seized on the Orlando outrage to claim validation for their over-broad views about Islam, to pillory political opponents, and to assert vindication for a proposed temporary ban on Muslim immigrants favored by the GOP presidential nominee — who surreally congratulated himself for ‘being right’ about the problem at hand, even as the dead and wounded were still being identified. Never mind that such a restriction would have done nothing to stop this individual, who was born in the USA and raised here for nearly three decades. Never mind that erecting a religious test for entry into the United States would be logistically shambolic, would risk needlessly alienating and hamstringing key Muslim allies whose help is essential in excising the Islamist cancer, and would arguably be flagrantly unconstitutional, depending on how it was applied. These are additional hard truths. Let’s face it: A tidy, ideologically-pure ‘fix’ to this threat does not exist. We live in a country in which guns are — and will remain — readily available as a constitutional right, and in which armed law enforcement cannot be everywhere at all times. By their very nature, free and open societies offer an endless supply of so-called “soft targets” that evil people can exploit if they choose to do so. And they are choosing to do so, even those who live in our midst and work alongside us for years. We shouldn’t shy away from thoughtful debate over whether there are better ways to keep firearms away from dangerous people, nor should we avert our eyes from the very real cultural beliefs and attitudes that infect a far broader swath of Islam than many would prefer to believe. But neither railing against the gun lobby nor mindlessly castigating the whole of Islam accomplishes anything productive, even if these intellectual pacifiers offer some fleeting sense of catharsis or comfort.