Evil reared itself Wednesday morning at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, Calif. That’s when heavily armed husband and wife Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik made their way into Farook’s office holiday party and unleashed terror.
Evil reared itself Wednesday morning at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, Calif. That’s when heavily armed husband and wife Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik made their way into Farook’s office holiday party and unleashed terror.
By the time the shooters fled, 14 were dead and 21 wounded. It was the most carnage inflicted in the United States since six teachers and 20 children were shot and killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. …
The myth promulgated by President Barack Obama and other gun control advocates that stricter gun laws will prevent the kind of mass murder that occurred in San Bernardino ignores an inconvenient truth — that there is an extremely small, extremely radicalized, extremely dangerous segment of the U.S. population that might not have sworn allegiance to America’s enemies, but almost certainly identifies with them.
That’s the disquieting finding of a report released this week by academics with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Support for radical Islam in this country has reached “unprecedented” levels, according to their report, “ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa.”
The forward was written by former nine-term Southern California Rep. Jane Harman, now president and chief executive of the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson Center. …
So how to prevent attacks like that at the Inland Regional Center? “It takes a 21st century approach,” Harman posited.
“The Internet overhauled radicalization,” she pointed out, “and it should upgrade the way we study it.” Indeed, she continued, “Some of the best information is open-source, plastered on message boards or a 19-year-old’s Twitter feed.” …
That suggests to us that our national security apparatus needs to start recruiting digital natives and train them to use their social media skills to ferret out potential lone wolves, such as Farook and Malik may turn out to have been.
That would by no means guarantee another Inland Regional Center won’t occur. But we think it would at least decrease the likelihood of further horror.
— The Orange County Register