Opinion

Obama is still in denial about terror in Orlando

President Obama proved Thursday that when it comes to radical Islam, he not only won’t say the words, he won’t even acknowledge the reality — or its role in the Orlando massacre.

Obama visited Orlando to meet privately with the relatives of Sunday’s victims and then to speak at a public memorial service.

But the only lesson Obama’s willing to draw from the attack is the need for gun control.

In linking Orlando to other horrors, he rightly mentioned last year’s San Bernardino attack. But not the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

Instead, he went back to 2012: the Aurora, Colo., movie-theater slaughter and the Newtown, Conn., school massacre — both perpetrated by mentally deranged gunmen.

In Orlando, he said, “the motives of this killer may have been different” — but he refused to even hint at what that motive was.

This, even as it becomes clearer with each passing day that Omar Mateen, inspired by Islamist propaganda, committed an ideological act of murderous terror.

No, all that mattered to the president was that “the instruments of death were so similar” to Aurora and Newtown.

Yes, they were. But while drastic steps like outlawing guns might have stopped a James Holmes or an Adam Lanza, it won’t stop a determined terrorist. The Boston killers, after all, used pressure cookers.

To be sure, the president spoke moving words of consolation to the families and others gathered to mourn. It’s a task that, sad to say, he’s had to perform too many times.

Yet there was a larger point to be made — just not the one our president chose to make.

Obama said the families he met with wanted to know why such killing sprees keep happening. As in Boston and San Bernardino, the answer in Orlando was not guns.