You’ve got to be incredibly careful of bias in a situation like this. Everyone who sets out to murder a lot of people shares in some of that Vegas-shooter mentality. They all are willing to take one giant step further than people who nevertheless sympathize with their motives, albeit to a lesser degree.
Just like people were talking about above that the incidence of women mass-shooters is so rare as to be the exception that proves the rule, the Vegas shooter is a weird case in that he had no discernible motive that could be called political. He just wanted to kill a bunch of people. It was kind of mind-bending in that we have become accustomed to these incidents eventually coming down to a motivation leading the shooter to select his targets rather than indiscriminately shooting just anyone.
Thus the designation of “terrorist” has as much to do with the attitudes of the audience as it does the motivations of the killer. When an already-othered brown person acts out his frustration with over a century of Western interference in his homeland, that’s obviously terrorism to an audience composed of the Western people he targets. McVeigh is routinely called a terrorist, in part because he blew up a building rather than going on a shooting spree, and the uncommon means makes him stand out, and in part because he was motivated to attack the government, and lashing out at the establishment is a great way to get all the media against you regardless of political leanings, but to a small minority of Americans who feel some grievance towards the ATF (justified or otherwise), McVeigh wasn’t a “terrorist,” but just a guy who took things one step too far. Likewise, the difficulty we seem to have labeling the gay nightclub shooter a “terrorist” says a lot more about lingering American animus towards gay people than is generally recognized.
In short, it’s not strictly about color of skin; it’s far more nuanced, but in the same vein: Outside its strict dictionary definition, “terrorist” is a term of othering, and whether we choose to apply it, apart from perplexingly random incidents like the Vegas shooting, is one way or another an expression of our willingness to sympathize with the killer. The more we do, the more we overlook the motivation and view the act as an isolated expression of individual madness.
