John McWhorter, writing in The Atlantic, argues slurs are the real profanity and using “fuck” to describe a mass shooting sounds about right.

In an America in which a hit children’s book can have the F-word in its title, as can a hit pop song by CeeLo Green, when WTF is emblazoned on T-shirts and countless people utter the relevant phrase as virtual punctuation even in formal settings, and when someone like me can openly attest that I use it freely in circumstances where my grandfather would have said damn or hell, it becomes clear that the F-word today is spicy, but hardly evil or taboo.

Yup.