ROBERT MCMANUS: No Equivalence: The premeditated murder of five Dallas cops was unjustifiable, under any circumstances.

To the untrained eye, the attack appears to have been well-planned and carried out with precision. In this respect, it was fundamentally different than the events that brought hundreds of demonstrators to downtown Dallas Thursday—the police-custody deaths of black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and St. Paul, Minnesota, in a welter of chaos, confusion, and conflicting claims of guilt, innocence, and intent.

Baton Rouge and St. Paul, like so many of the similarly tragic police-custody deaths that preceded them, may have been the product of circumstance, or of incompetence, or maybe they were even crimes. Each must be examined in context and judged accordingly. But Dallas was cold-blooded murder—nothing more, nothing less. Attempts to assign equivalence to the horror of it—to suggest, as some are already doing, that Dallas is somehow just deserts for Baton Rouge or St. Paul or Baltimore or Ferguson, or even for Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island two long years ago—is morally repugnant.

Moreover, the claim on many lips that “guns” are the issue is correct only in the most abstract sense. To blame inanimate objects for Dallas, Orlando, or San Bernardino, is to deprive both the victims and their executioners of their fundamental humanity. The Dallas gunmen may be evil beyond comprehension, but it is their actions, not their weapons, that must be of principal concern to decent people. The killers, and not just the killing, must be condemned without equivocation. Far too few people are willing to do this. So, guns are an easy out.

Well, it’s the only way Dem politicans can avoid the contradiction of being anti-police but wanting urban centers to prosper. But as Richard Fernandez notes, the contradictions are coming home to roost.