Guns and Terror

By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

07 December 15

yed Rizwan Farook walked out of a conference room at the Inland Regional Center, in San Bernardino, twice last Wednesday. His first departure was abrupt but not extraordinary; his colleagues at the county Department of Public Health, who had recently thrown a baby shower for him, continued to sit through a series of morning meetings, with the promise of holiday snacks ahead. Farook returned, with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, and by the time they left they had shot thirty-five people, fourteen of whom died. In the frenzy, the fire alarm went off and the sprinkler system was activated, so that when the police arrived it was as if they’d happened upon the aftermath of a storm. On a table, they found three pipe bombs, rigged to a bright-yellow remote-control toy car.

The couple had driven away in an S.U.V. stocked with two AR-15-style semiautomatic assault rifles, two 9-mm. semiautomatic handguns, and fourteen hundred rounds of ammunition for the rifles and two hundred for the handguns. After Farook and Malik were killed, in a firefight in which two officers were wounded, the police searched the house where they lived with their six-month-old daughter and found about five thousand rounds of ammunition, another rifle, and twelve pipe bombs. The authorities said that all the guns, manufactured by Smith & Wesson, Llama, and DPMS, were bought legally, either by Farook or by a friend.

The Inland Regional Center provides services to people with developmental disabilities, and at first there was shock at the idea that the center’s clients might have been a target. Then the news that civil servants had been killed made the situation seem, perversely, almost normal; some people hate the government, and in America hatred of any sort is never far from gun violence. Five days earlier, Robert Dear had walked into a Planned Parenthood health center in Colorado Springs, similarly armed with multiple weapons, and killed three people. By one estimate, there has been more than one mass shooting—defined as an incident in which at least four people are shot—for every day of this year. According to the Brady Campaign, seven children are killed by guns each day. After the Newtown school shooting, in 2012, there was a push to get a pair of modest bills through Congress—a ban on some assault weapons, the closing of background-check loopholes—but it failed. Gun laws are, on the whole, more lax now than they were on the day the twenty children and eight adults were shot dead. There are as many guns in private hands in America as there are people. The barriers to atrocity are low.

By Friday, law-enforcement officials had found a Facebook post that they attributed to Malik, pledging loyalty to isis. In a political culture less distorted by Second Amendment absolutism, this might have been a turning point for Republican lawmakers: Why not at least make it more difficult for potential terrorists to get guns? After the shooting, President Obama said that although there would always be people who wanted to cause harm, there were basic steps that might make it “a little harder for them to do it, because right now it’s just too easy.” In an interview with CBS, he noted that a person on the no-fly list “could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them”; on Thursday, a hastily prepared measure to address that died in the Senate.

Mostly, the Republican Presidential candidates seemed to see the discussion of terrorism as a route away from the topic of guns. “The first impulse I would have, rather than talking about gun control, is to make sure that we protect the homeland—and last week the metadata program was ended,” Jeb Bush said on Fox News, referring to new, minor limits on the N.S.A.’s access to telephone records. The same day, at a candidates’ forum held by the Republican Jewish Coalition, Ted Cruz said that the San Bernardino shooting, coming in the wake of the terror attack in Paris, “underscores that we are at a time of war.” As Cruz saw it, the problem was the passivity of the President, an “unmitigated socialist who won’t stand up and defend the United States of America,” and who “operates as an apologist for radical Islamic terrorists.” Donald Trump complained at the R.J.C. forum that Obama wouldn’t mention “radical Islamic terrorism,” adding, “He refuses to say it, there’s something going on with him that we don’t know about.”

The pro-gun side swerves between utter complacency about gun violence and a call for war on all fronts against terror. (“As if somehow terrorists care about what our gun laws are,” Marco Rubio said on Friday.) But something other than a lapse in logic is at work here. Warnings about terror and warnings about the government taking away people’s guns both play to a certain anxiety. Trump, the Republican front-runner, tells audiences that they have been tricked and left vulnerable, both economically and at moments when, he says, as in Paris last month, “nobody had guns but the bad guys.” Ben Carson has suggested that the Holocaust could have been prevented if it had been easier to get a gun in Berlin. Cruz has said that unfettered gun ownership isn’t just for hunting or home protection; it is “the ultimate check against governmental tyranny.”

To the extent that the Republican candidates recognize that the common denominator of mass shootings is guns, their answer is more guns—in the hands of everyone from preachers to Paris bartenders—and more fear, sown just as carelessly. Neither is a wise approach to addressing the real threat of terrorist attacks, whether homegrown or directed from abroad. Given the demagoguery that has characterized the G.O.P. campaign, with talk of religious databases, there are reasons for concern that, in the wake of San Bernardino, American Muslim communities will be subjected to bigotry and harassment. Already, during the past several months, there has been a spike in violence directed at mosques. This is terror, too.

What stops mass shootings from seeming routine is, ultimately, the particular stories of the people who died. Aurora Godoy and her husband eloped in 2012; she leaves behind a two-year-old son. Tin Nguyen was planning her wedding and the life she and her fiancé would share. Larry Daniel Kaufman’s boyfriend dropped him off at his job at the I.R.C.’s coffee shop that morning. Michael Wetzel, a father of six, coached a soccer team of five-year-old girls that, according to the Los Angeles Times, “had a princess theme.” The pipe bombs, which Farook and Malik appear to have assembled themselves, thankfully did not detonate, but the guns functioned just as they were built to.

When It Comes to Mass Shootings, Motive Doesn't Really Matter

By Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone

07 December 15

There is, apparently, nothing we could learn about a shooter that would compel Congress members funded by the gun lobby to make guns less accessible

he first news alert reporting a mass shooting usually contains just two pieces of information: a body count that will invariably be revised upwards, and the status of the shooter. If not dead, it is "active" or "at large" or "in custody."

Information is released in a slow drip after that. In the first hours we'll learn when the shooting began, what kind of room the gunman burst into, what he was wearing, what he said, the things the first panicked 9-1-1 callers told operators.

The piece of information we crave the most is the one we'll be forced to wait the longest for: Why?

At Columbine we were told the shooters did it was because they were bullied. At Newtown, because he was mentally ill. In Charleston, because he was a racist. In Colorado Springs, because "baby parts."

After San Bernardino, there was even more confusion than usual. What looked at first like an instance of workplace violence, officials are now investigating as an act of terrorism possibly motivated by the so-called Islamic State.

But if we're honest with ourselves, we should admit it doesn't matter either way. In at least one critical sense, motive doesn't matter when it comes to gun violence: No matter the reason a crime was committed, a powerful faction of our society has no interest in preventing another such massacre from happening.

There is, apparently, nothing we could ever learn about a shooter that would compel members of Congress funded by the gun lobby to make guns less accessible to individuals who use them to kill other people.

Assigning motive rationalizes violence, and shifts the focus from the facts — 14 dead, 21 wounded, with guns that were acquired legally thanks to the sustained efforts of the National Rifle Association — to speculation about individuals and their individual motivations.

America's problem with gun violence is not about individuals. We do not have isolated incidents of gun violence in this country. San Bernardino was the 355th mass shooting in the U.S. so far this year; 355 is a critical mass.

It doesn't matter whether alleged shooters Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were motivated by hatred for Farook's co-workers, or hatred for America, just like it would not have mattered if the people gathered in the room at the Inland Regional Center were, instead of co-workers, members of a rival gang or members of their own family.

The victims in San Bernardino would be dead regardless, and, recent history tells us, this country's leaders would still be doing nothing to prevent more people like them from being killed.

Want proof? Just one day after this week's shooting, the Senate voted 45 to 54 against an amendment that would require terror suspects to undergo background checks for gun purchases.

Maybe instead of searching for the gunmen's motives this time – and next time, and the time after that – we should investigate our own motives. Maybe we should interrogate the extremist ideology we're clinging to, the one that allows mass murderers unfettered access to the tools they need to kill.