The tragic slaying of three Muslims in North Carolina is understandably dominating the headlines this morning. According to his facebook page, the killer was a devout atheist and political liberal. I think it’s very rarely helpful or fair to connect political beliefs to the acts of possibly deranged or mentally ill individuals, and thankfully some of the smarter liberal commmentators such as Steve Benen agree with me on this point. And Benen was also correct to point out that some on the right have been too quick to blame politics as a motive for individual killings, such as when some conservatives engaged in overheated finger-pointing at New York’s liberal mayor Bill deBlasio after two NYPD officers were killed in December.

However, I do think it’s fair to say that attributing political motives to individual killings is much more of a phenomenon on the left. In recent years, liberal organizations and commentators have gone out of their way to connect mainstream conservative political beliefs to violence, and more often than not, such connections are dubious or nonexistant. Back in 2011, I addressed this unseemly tendency of the left in the wake of the Anders Brevik killings with “Debunking the Left-Wing Myths About ‘Right-Wing, Extremist Christians.'”