What happened in Wednesday's shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 and injured more than 20 was clearly a terrorist act. A young man does not leave an office party, drop off his six-month-old baby with his mother and return 30 minutes later with a woman and semi-automatic rifles and handguns in their procession and mow down innocents at a center for disabled people following a workplace dispute. The FBI says it is looking for the motive but the attack was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. The young married couple were clearly on a premeditated plan to kill as many people before the police could kill them. The suspects had more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition on them when they were killed and 4,500 more in their house. Twelve more pipe bomb devices and hundreds of tools used to make explosives were in the house, plus a remote control bomb. This incredible amount of weaponry can only suggest a pre-planned mission to kill. Because the couple had Arabic names, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, it will also be another case of Islamophobia in which the religion of Muslim Americans will be demonized by the action of two people whose actions do not represent an entire population of Muslims. Despite the shock and outrage by Muslim Americans across the US, they will once again have to bear the brunt of such attacks only because the attackers share the same religion. Perhaps the most unnerving part of the story, apart from the mass slayings, is that the couple showed no signs of what they were about to do. Farook was a second-generation American working in the US. He was on no radar screens and he never raised any red flags. The couple were not known to the FBI or on a list of potentially radicalized people nor had they had any known interactions with police. How a 28-year-old with an apparently normal background could have suddenly become so radicalized – he was apparently in touch with people being investigated by the FBI for international terrorism - and could have commited mass murder is as strange as it is chilling. It seems that a responsive and ready candidate can now be radicalized in a matter of months, not years. The issue of a possible threat posed by Syrian refugees entering the US and Europe is sidelined when terrorists are right in the backyard. Even if it was terrorism, the shootings once again brought up US gun laws because they are an underlying factor. The shootings were made easier by the fact that the US is the only developed nation on the planet that does not do much to keep combat assault weapons out of the hands of those who should not be able to get them. The guns used in the assault were legally purchased while the bigger guns, though not bought by Farook, were simply bought by somebody else and given to him. In the US, more mass shootings have occurred than days in this year — 351 mass shootings in 334 days. But despite frequent mass shootings, there has been growing frustration that little has been done in Washington regarding gun violence. Legislative efforts fall apart because of the entrenched power of the National Rifle Association which consistently references the US constitutional right to bear arms. The fact that Wednesday's shooting came on the heels of the Nov. 13 terrorist attack in Paris which killed 130 people underscores the terrorist threat that so many countries are now fighting. If a center for the mentally disabled can be a target for a terrorist attack, then many places in America and beyond are no longer out of reach.
