My CJ Column on San Bernardino

Reprinted with permission of the Courier-Journal  on why gun control cannot stop radical Islamic jihad:

We can all relate to the venue of the massacre. The terrorist attack in San Bernardino occurred at an office Christmas party, a potluck among colleagues. That fact is particularly poignant given all the trope in recent years about a War on Christmas.

San Bernardino is part of a war, and not just on Christmas. The two terrorists who killed 14 people and injured 21 others were part of a war against America and our way of life, a war against Christianity and Judaism, and a war against Western civilization.

This is true whether or not the shooters were acting on orders of a terrorist organization; it is clear where their sympathies lay.

Syed Rizwan Farook was born and raised in America. Tashfeen Malik was an  email-order bride brought to the U.S. on a “fiancée visa.” One of the most chilling facts of this tragedy is that she passed counter-terrorism screening. It may have been Malik who radicalized her husband, given her family’s ties to terrorism in Pakistan.

The couple was living the American dream: a secure job with benefits, a home in a safe neighborhood, freedom to worship at their mosque, a healthy baby. They were hardly marginalized or oppressed.

Whereas most parents baby-proof their home, Farook and Malik’s home included a cache of bullets, bombs and raw materials for making IEDs.

The couple tried to destroy their digital tracks the day before their rampage. Nonetheless, social media accounts connect both Farook and Malik to international terrorism suspects. Oddly, the couple appears to have supported rival factions of Islamofascism. Malik (under a nom de guerre) pledged her allegiance to an ISIS leader. Farook’s connections were to affiliates of al Qaeda.

Yet the Obama administration’s media apologists floated narrative after bogus narrative to portray the San Bernardino shooting as something other than what it clearly was: radical Islamist jihad.

The initial coverage tried to link the shooters to attacks against Planned Parenthood because there is a Planned Parenthood clinic 1.5 miles away from the shooting. Must be some crazy right-winger trying to take away women’s “right to choose.” Maybe a Tea Partier!

The next false narrative was workplace violence. This is the same storyline that the Obama administration maintains to this day about the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, who yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he killed 13 people.  Sure, Fort Hoot and San Bernardino were “workplace violence” in the sense that people died a violent death at their place of employment.

The same could be said of the flight crews on 9/11. They, too, died on the job.

Americans are not stupid, contrary to what the administration and media elites think. We can differentiate a terroristic attack from workplace violence.

Yet our current leaders seem unable or unwilling to draw this obvious distinction. Something (competence? candor?) is missing from the Obama administration’s response to the very real threat of terror we face.

It took President Obama four days to call the massacre terrorism. Then he gave a prime-time speech to the nation from the Oval Office to do nothing more than state the obvious. It was unclear whether Obama had just figured out that this was terrorism or had come to the reluctant conclusion that most of the country already had drawn.

So Obama tried to change the subject, by arguing to curtail the Second Amendment right to bear arms. The day before, The New York Times had gone so far as to run a front page editorial — its first in a century — advocating the confiscation of certain classes of guns.

This comes straight out of the playbook of former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Obama is just politicizing the deaths of San Bernardino to achieve a policy objective that he wanted anyhow. Rather than attack the enemy — radical Islamic jihad — he wants to disarm those of us who need protection.

San Bernardino happened notwithstanding (or maybe because of) California’s strict gun laws. Likewise, prohibiting people on the “no-fly list” from buying guns would not have prevented this shooting as that list is both under and over-inclusive. Neither Malik nor Farook was on that list, though the late Sen. Ted Kennedy was.

Gun control cannot stop a committed jihadist; it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. A box cutter and a plane become weapons of mass destruction in the hands of an Islamofascist. So can underwear, a shoe, and fertilizer.

Obama told us shortly before the massacre that Americans are safe from an attack such as recently occurred in Paris. San Bernardino proves that Obama is demonstrably wrong. We are not safe under his watch. The presidential election cannot come soon enough.

Bridget Bush is a Louisville attorney and founder of Elephants in the Bluegrass blog. Her column appears every third Wednesday in the Courier-Journal.