The terrible shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., have given just about everyone an opportunity to ride their favorite hobby horse — and never mind whether it has any relevance to the actual mayhem.
For the political right on blogs, talk radio and elsewhere, the tragedy is an opportunity to bewail the alleged reluctance of Washington and the mainstream media to face up to the threat of radical Islamic terrorism or even to call it by its name when it occurs.
The latter part of their charge actually has a grain of truth, but the idea that the U.S. hasn’t taken the threat of radical Islamic terrorism seriously for the past 14 years — both here and abroad — is staggeringly off base.
Are these critics living in the same country as the rest of us?
Nor is there any obvious way to prevent a Muslim born and raised in this country who has settled into a stable and productive life from being smitten by radical theology and taking up arms against his neighbors and co-workers. At least there is no way of preventing this phenomenon without trampling on privacy and other civil liberties and treating law-abiding, non-jihadist Muslims — the vast majority — akin to second-class citizens.
It may be that we will discover authorities were derelict in not picking up clues that Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, posed a detectable danger before the shootings. But that is speculation for the time being.
Meanwhile, for President Obama, the shootings were another opportunity to call for tighter gun control even before it was known officially what kind of guns had been used and whether they were legally obtained. Obama said the pattern of mass shootings in this country “has no parallel anywhere else in world,” which is an improvement over his claim after the Colorado Springs shootings that “this just doesn’t happen in other countries.”
Actually, it does happen elsewhere, and not infrequently. PolitiFact, a leading fact checker, labeled a similar claim earlier this year by Obama as “mostly false.”
It is true, of course, that the U.S. has by far the most mass shootings among developed countries and a comparatively high fatality rate, but as , three developed countries — Norway, Finland and Switzerland — actually have a higher fatality rate.
We’ve supported a variety of gun-control measures and editorialized just last week about the disturbing fact that people on the consolidated terrorist watch list aren’t barred from purchasing firearms. We also supported the weapons measures passed in Colorado two years ago, and would urge other states to adopt similar laws.
But assuming a right to own firearms — which we do — also assumes that determined people like the San Bernardino killers with no known police records and no record of mental illness will be able to acquire a deadly array of weapons — if not the exact guns that were used this week, then certainly others.
And after all, terrorists seem to obtain weapons in nations like France where far stricter laws are in place.
There are indeed additional steps the U.S. could and should take to prevent terrorism and to curtail the spread of dangerous weapons. But short of repealing the Second Amendment, they are modest reforms, not game changers. And serious adults, even in the throes of concern over a tragic slaughter, ought to be able to admit it.
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