Scripps Howard News Service

To use the Boston bombing to justify opposition to fixing the nation’s immigration problems is not only disingenuous, it is also downright stupid and not a little bit tragic. The tragedy comes in the repeated election and re-election of this clack of bozos that have no use for any policy that was in place after the dawn of the 20th century.

Defense policies are not created in a vacuum. They are designed to meet threats. Over time, threats change in ways that are difficult to predict. In the past, America’s enemies generally wore uniforms and confronted American soldiers on a foreign field of battle. Today, America’s enemies may wear backwards-facing baseball caps and attack marathon runners along with the men, women and children cheering for them on a sunny April afternoon in New England.

The Boston Marathon bombings marked the end of any expectation Americans have of privacy in a public place. Increasingly, they have lower expectations of privacy in nonpublic places, too.

In a galaxy far away and at some far distant time, historians contemplating a place called America on the planet Earth may find an astonishing mix of contrasts, where the most benign activities were strictly regulated while those with a potentially deadly outcome were treated as a sacred right. They might wonder about a society that required its citizens to license their dogs, their fishing access, the automobiles they drove and the peddlers they patronized, but resisted almost any effort to control the manufacture, sale and distribution of lethal firearms.

Homegrown or foreign-directed, it was terrorism — a coordinated act meant to kill, maim, confuse and frighten at a major American event — that we saw at the Boston Marathon on Monday.

Within minutes of the fatal bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, self-described “truthers” erupted worldwide across the Internet with conspiracy theories about the crime.

Their efforts to find sinister machinations in the tragedy seem, well, conspiratorial.

The euphoria of finishing the Boston Marathon hadn’t even worn off for me when I received a text from my panicked wife.

‘‘Explosion at Copley. Are you OK?”