San Bernadino killings: The US is dying for new gun laws. Again

As long as owning weapons is considered a human right, the country will be terrorised by its own population

The home of Syed Farook, whom the FBI suspect was radicalised by his wife, Tashfeen Malik (AFP)

It started on Wednesday as just another American mass shooting, one more tragedy that might have been avoided if the country had gun laws with a modicum of common sense. And in one sense the slaughter in San Bernardino, California, the deadliest since the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut that still haunts the national memory three years on, remains precisely that.

But now the ghastly events at the holiday office party of local health workers have become, as Americans say, a whole new ball game. The 14 people who died and the 21 who were wounded are victims of the first deadly attack in the US linked to IS, and the most devastating mounted here by radical Islam since 9/11. “We are investigating this as an act of terrorism,” the FBI director, James Comey, declared. What everyone had feared might happen has happened.

The sequence of events is now becoming clear, a strange fusion of domestic and Islamic techniques of terror. Syed Rizwan Farook, a devout but well-integrated young Pakistani-American who was born and raised in the US, finds and brings home a Muslim bride, Tashfeen Malik, from Saudi Arabia. They have a six-month-old daughter and live quietly. He has a job at the agency in San Bernardino.

But she seems to have radicalised him. They amass an arsenal of weapons at home, suggesting in hindsight they have been plotting other, perhaps bigger, attacks. On the fateful morning, the baby girl is parked with her grandmother. Farook goes to the party and may have taken offence at a colleague’s remark about his religion. (Enter that familiar American detonator of mass shootings, the workplace grievance.)

He leaves and returns with his wife, both armed with assault rifles and in military garb, to go on the rampage. Just before, or even during the slaughter, she posts a Facebook message pledging her allegiance to the IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But no suicide belts, Paris-style. Instead the tragedy ends in a made-in-America car chase and shoot-out in which both Farook and Malik are killed.

Every sign is that the incident was IS inspired, rather than IS directed. The organisation itself has confirmed as much, boasting through its news outlets that the attack was carried out by “supporters”, rather than its own dedicated fighters. And brag they might, for San Bernardino was an IS dream come true.

The fact that the attack was home grown, with no direction or communication from abroad, allowed it to fly underneath the FBI and National Security Agency radar. In this particular case there is no evidence Farook and Malik were part of a militant cell. But this does not mean that such autonomous, self-starting networks do not exist – even in a country where Muslim communities are more affluent, and better integrated into local society, than their counterparts in France or Britain. Uncovering such “self-radicalised” militants is the toughest challenge of all, as every counter-terrorism expert will tell you.

Equally pleasing to al-Baghadi and his high command, San Bernardino is likely to make relations worse between non-Muslim and Muslim America. Fears of more attacks, in equally innocuous, everyday places, will grow, as will the temptation to regard every young woman here in a hijab or niqab as a terrorist in disguise.

“Don’t let fear become disabling,” Comey implored Americans. But his words won’t stop the politicians demanding a tougher crackdown against potential terrorist suspects, as well as more emergency measures like the registry of Muslims proposed by Donald Trump. Such actions would only increase the belief of America’s Muslims they are being persecuted, and prompt some in the tiny fringe of them sympathetic to IS to take bloody revenge. It is a vicious circle from which only the terrorist state will benefit.

All of that said, however, you can’t divorce what happened in San Bernardino from America’s general gun lunacy. You don’t need to be a terrorist genius to walk into a shop and buy, perfectly legally, the type of assault weapons used by Farook and Malik, weapons whose only purpose is to kill people. If you buy them on the internet or at a gun show, you don’t even need to undergo a background check. And there’s nothing to stop you turning your garage into a weapons depot.

Tashfeen Malik, left, and Syed Farook died in a shoot-out with police (AP)

America, whose gun population now equals its human one, experiences more than one mass shooting a day. Not all are fatal, but at least four potential victims are needed to qualify. But once again, absolutely nothing will be done to tackle the epidemic.

Instead, a dreary ritual plays out. President Obama wrings his hands, and urges Congress to act. The politicians for their part offer their “thoughts and prayers” to the victims, but vote down (as the Senate again did last week) proposals to tighten background checks. The National Rifle Association, whose grip on legislators seems unbreakable, maintains a judicious public silence until the storm is over. Its defenders trot out the old red herring that what’s needed is an improvement in mental health services.

Mass killers can be embittered loners, paranoid fantasists, political ideologues or – as in San Bernardino – religious fanatics. But every incident has a common denominator: guns. Make guns harder to obtain and you have a chance to save lives.

Republicans in particular are impervious to such logic, even though they are the loudest in demanding a crackdown on terrorism to “keep America safe”. But tackle the gun scourge? Not a bit of it. Or what about barring people considered dangerous enough to feature on terror “no-fly” lists from buying guns? No way, says Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House; it would violate their constitutional right of due process.

And so the theatre of the surreal continues. Obama pleads for sanity, while Trump stretches his lead in the polls. And all the while gun sales reach record levels. Happy Christmas, America.