Lone lunatics who murder a bunch of strangers don’t deserve to have their culpability curbed.

Not even by a minuscule amount.

Yet the latest member of this most dubious of clubs already has what amounts to a publicity campaign that perversely diminishes his culpability.

Payton Gendron, 18, is accused of shooting 13 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. Ten people died.

Eleven of the 13 victims, and all 10 of those who died, are Black. Gendron apparently has described himself in writing as a white supremacist and anti-Semite, railing about “replacers” who “invade our lands, live on our soil, live on government support and attack and replace our people.”

So he’s a deluded bigot as well as a mass murderer.

This is hardly shocking.

Yet in the wake of the Buffalo massacre, some pundits weren’t content to try to place the tragedy into some broader societal context, a tactic with limited validity but one that needn’t diminish the criminal’s responsibility.

Instead, some commentators explicitly blamed people with particular political beliefs for, in effect, encouraging Gendron.

The editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to cite an example I read this week, opined that “once again, the truism that hate speech fosters violence has been tragically reconfirmed, this time in Buffalo, New York.”

That accusation, in addition to stretching beyond a reasonable level the definition of truism, is a curious mixture of the specific and the general.

Which hate speech, exactly, is the editorial board referring to?

If the speech in question is Gendron’s writings, then the claim is reasonable, albeit obvious — he’s a bigot whose personal hatred, exemplified by his writings, prompted him to shoot people, most of whom are Black.

But the editorial board then makes it clear that it’s not confining blame to the man who pulled the trigger.

The editorial goes on to contend that Gendron was “fueled by so-called replacement theory, the far-right fantasy that white Americans are being intentionally ‘replaced’ by invaders of color to steer politics leftward. As Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and top Republicans continue to toot this anti-immigration dog whistle, the bloodshed in Buffalo shows how easily it can translate into attacks on anyone who isn’t white.”

The audacity of that claim is breathtaking.

Although the editorial writers apparently aren’t quite confident enough to actually brand as conspirators Carlson and the other “top Republicans” — readers are left to decide for themselves which GOP members are the “top” ones — the implication is as blatant as the logic is flaccid.

Which is that if Carlson and his soulless cronies would quit whining about federal immigration policies, people like Gendron would stop murdering people.

This sort of simple-minded insinuation is always inappropriate, but it’s especially egregious when deployed in a matter as serious as mass murder.

The Post-Dispatch editorial board seeks to strengthen its case by comparing something Carlson said in 2018 — apparently his influence takes quite a while to percolate, at least when the person being influenced is 14, as Gendron would have been — to something Gendron himself wrote.

Carlson: “How, precisely, is diversity our strength?”

Gendron: “Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength?”

So by virtue of similarly worded questions about the value of diversity we are to conclude that Tucker Carlson inspired a mass murder in Buffalo.

Speaking of comparisons, The Seattle Times editorial board picked the same verb as the Post-Dispatch to further this specious cause-and-effect indictment. The Seattle Times described the Buffalo murders as “yet another massacre fueled by a formerly fringe belief that has found a mainstream foothold thanks to irresponsible pundits and political opportunists on the right.”

The Seattle paper’s editorial board was slightly more specific in its accusation, with Ann Coulter and another Fox News’ host, Laura Ingraham, joining Carlson among those implicated in the acts of a madman.

That trio, the editorial board wrote, has “helped legitimize this paranoid delusion, while some GOP leaders have made the bet that stoking racial animosity will keep them in power.”

The difference between cynical politicians and talk show hosts trying to capitalize on immigration policy debates, and blaming at any level those same people for “fueling” a mass shooting, is to me a great chasm.

Yet these two editorial boards seem to believe that the connection is more comparable to a coach relaying signals to his players.

This offends me not because the flimsy association between killers and TV personalities and politicians — neither of the latter group having a history of shooting up supermarkets — is unfair, although of course it is.

I’ve listened to a fair amount of Tucker Carlson’s thoughts on immigration, and I think he greatly exaggerates the threat that our porous southern border poses.

What bothers me is that pundits seem to believe killers such as Gendron are mindless pawns who only respond, to borrow the clumsy analogy from the Post-Dispatch, to a “dog whistle” blown by TV personalities.

Besides the absence of any compelling evidence that these killers are driven by anything other than their own malfunctioning minds, this rhetorical approach siphons some of the guilt from Gendron and sprinkles it where it does not belong.

The logical conclusion to this illogical conceit is that a talk show host such as Carlson, whose audience is measured in the millions, ought not criticize the federal government’s immigration policy both because such criticism is inherently racist, and because there lurk among us people like Gendron who would allegedly draw inspiration from a legitimate political debate.

This of course is antithetical to America’s commitment to free expression.

I don’t know that we can trust that commitment, with anything like the confidence we once had, if people begin to censor themselves for fear their opinions, no matter how reasonably formed and calmly stated, might share a phrase or two with the scribblings of a demented killer.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.