Leading into the late hours of October 1 on the Las Vegas Strip, a gunman posted at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino opened fire during the last act of the Route 91 Harvest country music festival.

Through the next few days, the casualty and injured list began to increase substantially, totaling now to more than 50 killed and over 200 injured. Following the massacre, the shooter, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, took his own life before reaping the repercussions of his lethal actions.

Despite his gruesome acts, the media still seems to avoid, for whatever reason, using the word that describes him best: a terrorist. Call him what he is.

It seems that in the country’s history of terror attacks, only a few perpetrators will actually earn the title of a “terrorist,” despite fitting the bill. In fact, it seems that the only time this term is used to describe a mass murderer is when the perpetrator is not white.

Take, for instance, the Boston Marathon Bombing back in 2013.

The two men responsible for this attack, both of Islam faith, were almost immediately referred to as terrorists by both the general public and the media.

However, in 2015, white teenager Dylann Roof killed nine people when he opened fire in a church in Charleston and was not treated the same way by the media.

This leads me, and many other citizens, to start picking up on a central issue in not only the media but in American society itself; people believe that a criterion to be considered a terrorist is to be either of Islamic or Muslim faith or to be from another country.

This, by definition, is not the case.

The definition of terrorism, given to us by Merriam-Webster, refers to the use of violence to frighten people in order to achieve a personal goal. In Dylann Roof’s case, this goal was to further his white supremacist agenda, making Roof a textbook terrorist.

But it doesn’t seem to matter what the literal definition of terrorism is to the media. It doesn’t matter if an entire crowd of people scream that Dylann Roof and Stephen Paddock and the Columbine Shooters are all terrorists, because they don’t look the way people think terrorists are supposed to look.

So, instead of calling them what they are, they try to humanize these terrorists. Dylann Roof was mentally ill, Stephen Paddock was a grandfather, Adam Lanza was a quiet introvert.

Why are we protecting the reputations of mass murderers? Of textbook terrorists? Stephen Paddock just days ago killed nearly 60 people and injured hundreds more, yet the media focused on attempting to tie him to Islam faith (with no luck), and when they couldn’t do that they reverted back to their usual ways and began producing headlines that humanize this murderer.

This is not okay.

This isn’t new or profound information, we see this every day when a black man is killed by a cop. Instead of referring to the cop as a killer they refer to the victim as a thug. Somehow, people still aren’t seeing the issue. If you’re going to call the Marathon Bombers terrorists, be prepared to call Stephen Paddock a terrorist, be prepared to call Dylann Roof a terrorist.

If you aren’t prepared to use the same rules for one terrorist on another, perhaps you’re part of the problem.