Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Southern California center for the developmentally disabled came on the heels of other US massacres but differed from most in key ways, including the involvement of multiple people, including a woman, and an apparently well-planned escape route.
In the San Bernardino area near the site of the attack that killed 14, the police said a man and a woman dressed in tactical gear died in a gunfight with the police, as the FBI said the agency was considering the possibility that the shooting could be a terrorist attack.
“These are people that came prepared,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said in a news conference. “They were dressed and equipped in a way that indicates they were prepared. They were armed with long guns, not handguns.”
“Terrorist attack” is now being used as a euphemism for an attack having radical Islamist motivation. The male attacker’s family and neighbors say that he had become “very religious,” scrupulous about the ritual prayers and wearing the Salafi-style long gown and cap. Perhaps more investigation will make the motivation clear. It was clearly not a spur of the moment action; extensive preparations had been made.
The Tsanaev brothers also made extensive preparations, also adopted radical Islamist thought. It is time for a better approach than calling this “workplace violence”, nagging for gun control (California has the most strict gun control laws in the nation), and ignoring who these perpetrators are and what they believe.
The question is, how many more are out there?
Very good points. Until the nature of the problem is acknowledged, your intelligence services will not be able to effectively work at detecting these people. That means human as well as electronic intelligence.
And in the end, good intelligence is more than 80% of the battle.