The President has used the attack as another opportunity to plump for more gun control. Frequently has he done this, but all of a sudden the President has latched on to the “no-fly/no-buy” connection, and he thinks (finally) he has a winner. “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon?,” he asked in his address to the American people last Sunday night. Of course, no one wants to allow a “terrorist suspect” to buy any type of firearm, so let’s ask the President some questions: “Why are we not detaining or arresting every ‘terrorist suspect’?” Or, “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to enter the country in the first place?”The President made his point about gun control, but in doing so he missed the main point.
The President seems to have a puzzling scant regard for due process and Constitutional rights. The jarring truth is that neither of the San Bernardino killers were on the no-fly list. Another jarring truth is that the no-fly list is not limited to “terrorists,” is notoriously filled with names of people who should not be on it, and (obviously) misses many who should be on it.
We also would ask the President, “What could possibly be the argument for operating a pipe-bomb factory in one’s garage?” That’s something that the two killers did, and it was an absolutely and unequivocally illegal act that went undetected – possibly because the observant neighbor failed to pass her suspicions along. She “saw something” but was afraid to “say something” for fear of being considered Islamophobic.
Which leads us to something else the President said – that America is not at war with Islam (something that President George W. Bush also said, by the way), and that we should be careful not to discriminate against Muslims. Well, again we challenge the President to name one responsible person who has said we are at war with Islam; and we also challenge him to name any person (other than Donald Trump) who wants to discriminate against Muslims. It is vital that we not tar all Muslims with the brush of radicalism or jihadism; but it also is a uncomfortable truth that many honest folks have, just as did that neighbor in San Bernardino, realistic fears of being called a bigot by some Muslim-rights organization, or (see below) the Department of Justice. Since the San Bernardino attack, many courageous Muslims have in interviews stated their hope that President Obama would call radical jihadism what it is. They, devout Muslims all, say that his failure to do so makes it that much harder to defeat jihadism.
Which leads us to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who told an audience that “her greatest fear” is that there might be attacks on Muslims by people reacting to jihadi violence. Think about it – her “greatest fear” is not the terrorism itself, but a potential violent reaction to it. We will concede that the Attorney General’s “greatest fear” is a more logical response that the President’s “greatest threat” – that is, Climate Change. Attorney General Lynch provided some numbers to her audience: She said“there have been 225 suspects charged with hate crimes over the last six years, and since September 11, 2001, “over a thousand investigations into acts of Muslim hatred, including rhetoric and bigoted actions, with over 45 prosecutions arising out of that.” That's about half the number of ISIS sympathizers who have been arrested in the US in the last two years. We don’t want to be accused of disregarding anti-Muslim bigotry, but if the most the Attorney General can come up with is 45 prosecutions in fourteen years – it doesn’t seem like America is a hothouse for anti-Muslim crime.
Let’s be clear about the killers of San Bernardino: the husband had traveled to Saudi Arabia for an extended period of time; the wife was here under a “fianceé visa” that was issued despite some inaccurate information on the application. There were all sorts of red flags that have become known after the fact – and yet the couple were not under scrutiny. This is not a police state – and we are not asking that the government start tracking Muslims or anybody else, without warrants properly issued. But obvious questions should be asked about how this couple escaped scrutiny and was able to practice its criminal behaviors without being detected. We think it would be better for the government to tighten up its rules of entry for internet brides who attend the “Red Mosque” or lie on their applications, or to supervise those people who marry them; or who travel to hostile areas or spend extended periods of time in certain Middle-eastern countries than it would be to take away weapons from honest citizens or to threaten to prosecute people for “anti-Muslim rhetoric.”