Seven hours ago as I write, a gunman killed 50 people in Orlando about 15 miles from my home. I was not there, and thanks to Facebook and texting, my kids and their friends are okay – not that the names of the dead have been released.

The nation will focus on radical Islamic terrorism. It will focus on the suffering families of the deceased and the wounded. Soon it will focus on the who, why and how of the shooter.

Here, however, is what runs through your mind – a series of related and out-of-the-ballpark thoughts – when terrorism hits close to home:

• Is my 22-year-old daughter safe? We were together last night, and she left my house very tired at midnight, so surely she didn’t go back out – right?

• Is her roommate safe? He’s gay; he goes out to nightclubs. How about Adam? He grew up in my backyard.

• Who else? My three kids were all in high school Thespians, and friends were gay and straight. They’re all from the Orlando area, and they’re all in their 20s. When they release that list of the dead, will a name jump out?

• Was the shooter simply anti-gay? If so, why didn’t he come a week earlier during Orlando Gay Days? Why didn’t he go to Fort Lauderdale or Miami?

• Why did the shooter drive to Orlando? Disney World has no strategic significance, but it’s on the U.S. list of possible terrorism targets, mainly because a terror attack there would strike at America’s emotional heart. Did the shooter know that? Was that his goal?

• OMG, I was at Disney last night. I was in the Magic Kingdom, the highest-profile target out of four parks. I don’t thing I dodged a bullet, but it was a public place, it was high profile, and it was crowded.

• Disney may deserve tons of credit for its security procedures. I’ve seen monorails pause while dogs routinely enter each section. I’ve been randomly selected twice after bag checks to walk through a metal detector – I blame my bulgy cargo pants. That level of security takes away from the magic, but it clearly works.

• When the list of the dead comes out, it will surely include a person or two who works at Disney or Universal. My older daughter’s best friend already checked into Facebook to say she’s safe. Thousands upon thousands of people probably have her picture – she leads the Hogwarts’ choir in the Universal Studios’ stage show. If one of the dead has played Prince Charming or Snow White, everyone who visited Orlando recently has lost a friend.

I grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and made peace with that fact that, in a nuclear war, we’d be one of the first to go. Home to the U.S. Army War College, it has both a symbolic and tactical reason to be eliminated.

But Orlando? The happiest place on earth? This makes no sense.

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