Let’s stop pretending gun control alone could have prevented San Bernardino
Even the most ideal version does nothing when faced with a model citizen on a mission.
“Everything checked out,” said Doyle Miller, former landlord of Syed Farook, of one of the suspects in this week’s fatal shooting in San Bernardino, Ca. in an interview with CNN. “He had good credit reports … everything.”
So agreed local and federal authorities. Farook, who was killed after a shootout with police, had no criminal history whatsoever. Friends, coworkers and people who attended his mosque said there were no indication that he was violent. His wife, and fellow suspect Tashfeen Malik came out clean, too. Neither was on any list of potentially radicalized people; neither had known ties to overseas radical groups. He legally purchased several handguns that were used in the shooting, police have clarified.
Yet among progressive circles, the most recent tragedy has been met with renewed calls for sweeping gun control regulation at the federal level. Extended background checks, wait times, assault weapon bans are being called for, starting with President Obama all the way down the establishment. Identical moments of outrage, coupled with the same calls to action, happen every time there’s a tragedy that even approaches the scale of San Bernardino. “As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes,” read the cover of the New York Daily News following the attack, blaming those who have opposed gun control regulation in the past for this week’s tragedy.
Lost in this brouhaha is the fact even in a legislative dream world where the kind of gun control the majority of Americans are calling for actually passed, Farook, a seemingly model American citizen, would still have been able to purchase his guns.
And even in an ideal world where this tragedy could have been prevented through legislation, it would hardly be an ideal arrangement for progressives. If an impossible piece of legislation was somehow passed that would repeal the Second Amendment once and for all, not only would it would fly in the face of a 2008 Supreme Court ruling which declared for the first time that the Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, but it would leave open the possibility that other progressive victories that have been won through the courts — the striking down of same-sex marriage bans and the upholding of Obamacare subsidies, to name a few recent ones — could simply be repealed through the will of the majority, which is decidedly against those issues in Washington.
Simply put, that dream world would be a slippery slope, which could quickly turn into a nightmare.
The fact is that gun control legislation alone, as it exists, is simply not enough. Rampant gun violence is a profound problem in a America, which is arguably better tackled through community initiatives put into action rather than lofty policies that are near impossible to implement. One such program that consisted of a partnership between police and community leaders — Ceasefire — was put in place in Boston, and the number of youth homicides plummeted 63% in the two years after it was adopted. Calls to have the program funded and adopted across the nation have fallen on deaf or unwilling ears in the Obama Administration.
A vast majority of gun violence in this country happens in the inner city. This kinds of violence often follows at least a semblance of a pattern — a particular neighborhood, city or other subgroup that might benefit from concentrated resources. With the right amount of political will, programs like the one mentioned above offer at least a glimpse of hope that something might be able to be done about it.
But mass shootings like the one that happened in San Bernardino, while they receive an outstanding amount of attention, account for about 1% of overall homicides, according to ProPublica. They seemingly defy patterns, and thus they’re infinitely harder to tackle through legislation.
Out of all the information that has publicly been released about Farook and his wife’s lives prior to the shooting, for example, the one thing that could be seen as a red flag is shaky at best, and would have been hardly noteworthy, had this week’s events not come to pass.
According to the FBI, Farook had “soft” (read: infrequent) connections with someone overseas who was being investigated for possible terror connections. These came through phone calls and social media, and the last communique between them was months ago. By the FBI’s own admission, this is not something that would warrant extended surveillance or resources from investigators, much less repealing Farook’s right to bear arms.
In an interview with CNN, Farook’s family attorney Mohammad Abuershaid insisted that there was absolutely nothing that could have tipped the family or authorities off to what happened on Wednesday. Even Farook’s trips to Saudi Arabia — a nation that has long been suspected of exporting terror — were hardly calls for alarm, his attorney insisted. The first trip was in 2013 to complete the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, a trip that all Muslims are required to take once in their lives. The second trip was last year, when he went to marry Malik, after they had met online.
To suggest that the trips to Saudi Arabia were a cause for alarm would suggest the U.S. resort to extreme measures along the lines of what Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump said he would “certainly implement”: setting up a database to track Muslims across the nation. That idea was sharply rebuked, for reasons that are self-evident.
It wasn’t until a few days later that we learned that Malik made a post on a pseudonymous Facebook account, pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a detail that was followed by the FBI announcing it now considers the attack to be an act of terrorism. Even still, there’s no indication that she was even in touch with anyone in the group or that it was directed by ISIS; she merely pledged her allegiance to the leader, as far as anyone knows.
On so many levels, the crossroads progressives find themselves on is unsettling. On the one hand, if she posted these things online before the attack, how did federal investigators not catch wind of it and act upon it? On the other, progressives cheered loudly when a federal court struck down the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection, and long decried that the New York City Police Department’s Muslim surveillance program, which was shut down last year was just wrong. Because living in a surveillance state is bad.
Likewise, there is an unspoken tension at work here with the issue of gun control. Yes, most Americans want it, and yes a tragedy such as this one puts the issue in the spotlight. But even if Congress passed the most ideal gun control legislation imaginable, in this case, it would hardly have been a silver bullet for this mass shooting, pardon the pun.
Policy has its place in keeping America safe, and undoubtedly gun control legislation could prevent some horrible people from legally acquiring firearms, and maybe even prevent an untold number of potential tragedies. But even the most ideal law has profound limitations. Let’s not pretend that a piece of paper can stop an otherwise upstanding American citizen and his wife who have set out on a horrible, horrible mission.
