This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 9th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When you attach an ideological commitment to an act of senseless violence, that violence doesn't then become sensible.

So what ideologies do terrorists attach to their actions?

What are the risks of generally treating all mass killings as terrorism.

Edo's Alex Narasta comments.

How important do you think it is that we try to drill down so deeply into whatever ideology we can identify as having inspired or at least

provided the pretext for mass killings in the United States.

So it's helpful on one hand to understand why people commit the crimes that they do or

the atrocities and attacks that they do.

I think that helps us frankly understand

the world we're living in a little better.

But in terms of trying to use that

to prevent these crimes from happening in the future.

I don't think it's that useful.

I think in a sense what we're seeing with mass killings, what we see with terrorism, what we see with these types of events is basically

our generation serial killer.

Whereas in the past, in the 70s, in the 80s, before, these people behave differently. Now this is a way for them to kill

a lot of innocent people sort of in one event rather than in multiple events over several years.

So it's hard to understand sort of the mind of crazy people like this

who want to kill for these reasons and I just doubt that if these

ideologies didn't exist like white supremacy or Islamism I think a lot of them would find

...