When you heard 10 dead in school shooting what was your first thought?

From BBC:

Nine people have been killed and seven injured in a shooting at a college in the US state of Oregon, say police.

The gunman, 26, opened fire at Umpqua Community College on Thursday morning and was killed in a police shootout.

You probably thought it was a lone shooter walking through a school and killing students and teachers. You probably did not think the perpetrator it was a jihadi terrorist. As things stand this morning, you were right.

Chris Harper Mercer, 26, has been identified as the shooter by several media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, and CBS News, all citing law enforcement sources. At least one injured survivor reports that he asked Christians to stand up and then targeted them. Yet, I have not seen one news source, nor politician, describe this as a terrorist act. ShootingTracker.com lists 294 “mass shootings” so far this year in the U.S. We instantly draw upon our stereotypes to classify these acts as “terrorist” or “deranged.” 

Deconstructed, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between a heinous event like the nine murders yesterday in Oregon and the single murder of Nathan Cirillo on Oct 22, 2014. Place, victim, weapon, religious belief, clothing… Humans love to categorize and we draw upon all sorts of things to place events into categories. But, our categories may not make sense

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Categories matter. Chris Harper Mercer seems to have posted various clues online. More will come out in the coming days, I’m sure. Still, nobody has yet called this a failure of intelligence agencies because nobody wants to place Mercer into the terrorist category. What is the difference between what Mercer did yesterday and what Ivan Lopez did at Fort Hood in 2014 or what Nidal Mailk Hasan did at Fort Hood in 2009? Very little other than motive – Hasan was a solider of Allah.

Is a motive, conceived in a disturbed mind,  the sole determination of whether we classify an act as terrorist v. deranged?