The deadliest mass shooting in US history has fallen, whether by chance or design, in the middle of the most volatile and divisive election year in living memory. United as they are in outrage, Americans are bitterly divided in their view of the required response.

Many Democrats hold that stricter gun control would help to prevent deranged killers, whatever their ideological bent, from accessing the weapons necessary to carry out atrocities. On the Republican right and in some other circles, there is an alarming propensity to view this crime through the prism of Islamophobia, even though it remains unclear what precisely drove the 29-year-old lone gunman, Omar Mateen, to slaughter more than 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

President Barack Obama has described the shootings as both an act of terror and a hate crime, the latter because lesbians and gays were targeted. There are also obvious echoes of the attack last year at the Bataclan theatre in Paris, where an organised Isis cell killed 89 people and injured many more. As well as various leads pointing to the possibility that Mateen was inspired by Isis, there are sufficient similarities between the Orlando and Paris attacks to warrant investigation.