"If we were to start profiling people of 'Middle-Eastern' or 'brown' appearance, jihadists will simply recruit white Muslims from the Caucasus, like the Tsarnaev brothers..."

"... who struck at the Boston Marathon. In fact, al Qaeda has been trying to use our very prejudices against us for many years, which is why Osama Bin Laden recruited a 'white army of terror' from the huge number of converts that joined his cause. If it is only men we profile, jihadists will train women, such as the Chechens did with their Black Widows, or this latest Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino. Astoundingly, male jihadists have even cross-dressed in burkas to avoid capture. If it is any adult of fighting age that we screen for, jihadists have turned to grandmother suicide bombers and even animals laden with explosives."

Wrote Maajid Nawaz, whose Wikipedia page I'm reading after seeing him on TV talking about Brexit.

How will Clinton and Trump and their proxies talk about the Orlando shooting/terrorism?

We saw how the different political candidates talked about the San Bernardino massacre, which happened last December. As I remember it, roughly, Clinton and Obama centered on guns and lectured us about the need for gun control, and Republicans talked about immigration policy and Islamic extremism.

Now, closer to the election, what framework will be imposed? Something was learned from the politics around San Bernardino and the primary season is over, so I suspect that Democrats will not choose to emphasize gun control (unless this turns out to have been a lone mentally ill person). The Democrats may try to use the idea of an attack on a gay club to criticize Donald Trump for creating a divisive atmosphere of hate, even though none of his alleged hate-mongering has been about gay people. As for what Trump and his proxies will say, it depends on who the murderer turns out to be.

I'm going to watch all the Sunday morning talk shows, and I will update this post as I hear various statements. The previous post is for comments about the terrible incident itself. Forgive me for being so brutal as to go immediately to the effect on presidential politics, but please keep the comments here to this topic, which I think is important because — like the San Bernardino massacre (and even more than it) — this event is a skewing point in electoral politics, and everyone speaking for the campaigns knows it. Sympathy will be expressed, along with warnings to wait to hear the facts, but the politics are underway, and I'm going to tell you about what everyone does on the TV shows this morning.

1. "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper devoted nearly the entire show to news coverage of the event. In the final 5-minute segment. Tapper displayed the tweets from Donald Trump — "Really bad shooting in Orlando. Police investigating possible terrorism. Many people dead and wounded." — and Hillary Clinton — "Woke up to hear the devastating news from FL. As we wait for more information, my thoughts are with those affected by this horrific act. -H" Tapper noted that the "H" at the end of a tweet on Hillary Clinton's account indicates that "she herself wrote that tweet." After that the guest is the Republican Congressman Peter King, who knows the name of the shooter but won't say it and knows of indications of "Islamist leanings," but the discussion was focused on the facts of the incident.

2. "Fox News Sunday" with Bret Baier went straight to politics, with Senator Jeff Sessions as the Trump proxy and Senator Amy Klobuchar as the Clinton proxy. Sessions, asked about the Orlando incident, said it "certainly looks like... Islamic extremism" and stressed the need to "openly and directly" confront the extremist element within Islam, including restricting immigration. Baier prompted him to connect the incident to guns and to Clinton's support for gun control, and Sessions slotted in his talking point about the Supreme Court and the supposed precariousness of the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms. Klobuchar emphasized waiting for more information and the importance of not seeming to accuse all Muslims (and she credited Sessions for having said the same thing). She brought up guns only when Baier asked her, and then only to blandly reference common-sense limits that wouldn't infringe the gun rights that she assured us Clinton believes in.

3. "Meet the Press" began with news and news analysis, and that analysis went heavily into the subject of guns, how much damage one person could do in a crowded place with the kind of guns this murderer had. The name is now being said, Omar Mateen, and there are repeated references to the man's father saying that his son was recently enraged when he saw 2 men kissing. I get the sense that the show would like to forefront hatred of gay people and minimize the significance of his religion, which is Muslim. The show switches over to Chuck Todd with the this set up: "Obviously, there are many elements to the story, we don't want to play the politics too much... but obviously, this will play into the presidential elections." That's not in the official show transcript (here). I guess the show got re-edited. Todd credits Trump and Clinton with being low key, but complains about the excessively political tweets of other, unnamed, politicians and homes in on gun control.

4. The "Face the Nation" time slot was straight news, no political spinning.

5. "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos had by far the most coverage of the presidential campaign, with a pre-recorded interview from Paul Ryan (that's worth discussing, but didn't cover the incident) and interviews with Trump's man Manafort and with Bernie Sanders. But there was a panel in the end — transcript —that eventually touched on the incident in the way that the second paragraph of this post anticipated. Katrina Vanden Heuvel was attacking Donald Trump for his "fear mongering and exploiting racial anxieties and bigotry" and, bringing up the Orlando incident, she said:

Donald Trump's idea of a counterterrorism program is banning all Muslims, bombing all families in the Middle East, essentially [sic] -- ISIS families, and torturing -- I think the, you know, grief and anger today. But we can't lose sight of senseless gun violence and the gun epidemic in this country. 66 people killed in Chicago in May. Hillary Clinton has a very strong gun control program. Trump, he's tethered to the NRA. I think that has to be...

When I heard that I said out loud, "That does not help Hillary." Then Donna Brazile followed on with generic references to "mass shootings" (and not terrorism), and I was saying "This isn't what Hillary wants to hear." That set up Bill Kristol, who prefaced his remark with "Look, I am anti-Trump" and proceeded with what I consider absolutely apt political analysis:

[I]f this was an act of Islamic terrorism, whether a lone wolf, or perhaps a lot of lone wolves turn out to have connection abroad one way or the other.... But if he was motivated by Islamist jihadist ideology, these talking points are not going to work, it's going to -- Donald Trump, the best moment, I say this with regret, the moment that helped Trump win the nomination was the San Bernardino massacre and his calling for a ban of all Muslims, which is an insane -- bad public policy, undoable, and we shouldn't do it. Having said that, it helped him. And I think we shouldn't kid ourselves. And, frankly, if these are the Democratic talking points here, senseless gun violence, it's not senseless.

It's not senseless. That's right. It's the sense of some people who have a specific ideology of hate and violence. Blaming the guns was the Democrats' instinctive move last December after the San Bernardino massacre, and it was the wrong choice politically. Hillary needs to set herself up as a resolute fighter against terrorism, and I think she will. Obviously, Trump will. It would be stupid to cede that ground to him. But real left-wingers like Katrina Vanden Heuvel — not helping Hillary —  head directly to the their anti-gun safe space.

ADDED: As noted above, what showed on "Meet the Press" for me wasn't the same as the transcript. I'm reading that now. There was a panel with Tom Brokaw, Hugh Hewitt, Amy Walter, and Joy Reid. Tom Brokaw went first and said it didn't matter whether the facts end up showing that the shooting was "connected to some kind of an international group," because, for him, the problem is guns. Hewitt focused on ISIS, but Walter and Reid stuck with the gun theme. When Hewitt said, "ISIS would do this to a hundred million Americans if they could," Reid rejoined: "But so would white nationalists."

"If Apple is forced to open up an iPhone for an American law enforcement investigation, what’s to prevent it from doing so for a request from the Chinese or the Iranians?"

"If Apple is forced to write code that lets the F.B.I. get into the Phone 5c used by Syed Rizwan Farook, the male attacker in the San Bernardino attack, who would be responsible if some hacker got hold of that code and broke into its other devices?"

What if Americans stopped believing the travel propaganda?

You'd get articles in The Daily Beast with titles like "American Tourists Quit Trying to Understand the World/The United States initiated a new golden age of travel. Now terrorism and fear-mongering by demagogues is grounding the project."

"Fear-mongering by demagogues" is propaganda, but so is taunting people about not engaging in tourism — saying they've caved to fear-mongering demagogues — and portraying tourists as engaged in a lofty pursuit of "understanding the world."

There are pro and con arguments for traveling and for not traveling, and people weigh the pros and cons for themselves. I don't see the rationality of declaring that those who decide not to travel are irrational. You could be rational or irrational either way.

The writer of this Daily Beast piece, Clive Irving, is a senior consulting editor at Condé Nast Traveler, so he's interested in promoting travel and boosting the mood of the people who choose to spend the money, make the effort, and take the risks of traveling and looking down on those of us who lean toward thrift, comfort, and safety. The prime argument is that the travelers are genuinely interested in learning about the people of the world and that those who stay at home are not. Here's Irving:

Mass tourism swamped iconic destinations like Venice and the French Riviera. But the real travelers—as opposed to the tourists—were no longer blinkered by a Eurocentric idea of what constituted a civilized culture. To these people the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia became as important to see as the cathedral at Chartres, or Kyoto, the old imperial capital of Japan, as spellbinding as the ruins of ancient Rome.

Notice what's not there: the people who actually live in these foreign lands. These are lovely old sites. I went to Rome. Upon arrival, I was robbed, but later I saw the ruins of ancient Rome. I can honestly say I was not "spellbound." Yes, this is the place that I've long known about, these stones are the stones... but the value lies in what I know because I've read about ancient Rome, and it is more reading that has a shot at spellbinding me. Do the people who travel have a more wide-ranging mind than the people who read and think about the world? Anyway, as Irving observes, places like the ancient ruins of Rome have tourists walking all over the place. And I'm sure Angkor Wat has tourists walking into your camera shots trying to get you out of their camera shots, even though these shots are unlikely to be as good as a hundred photographs you could see right now by Googling for images of Angkor Wat (or watching the last season of "Survivor").

More from Irving:

By traveling, Americans had found out for themselves that abroad was, in reality, a complex and volatile place where people did not immediately accept American exceptionalism, had a pride in their own differences and values—and were prepared to debate them with open minds.

Who travels to a foreign country and engages the locals in debates about American exceptionalism? Or does Irving really mean that by traveling, an American can absorb some snubs and sneers from people who don't like Americans for reasons that will not be explained on the scene but could be grasped through reading and thinking.

There is a lot of detail in Irving's article about "the indignities and frustrations" of airports and airplanes and quite an effort to tie these problems to what he sees as an overreaction to terrorism. He says that after terrorist attacks Americans are "less resilient" than Europeans:

The San Bernardino slaughter.... produced a completely disproportionate change of mood, turned uglier after being fueled by politicians, building on foundations laid by imbecilic xenophobes like Ann Coulter.

And:

Nothing reinforces ignorance more than isolationism. Fear of “the other” intensifies as people retreat behind barricades in their minds, while the actual physical barricades fail to produce enduring security. Reinforced borders and walls promote friction and conflict, not contact. Personal contact—the kind of contact that breaks barriers of attitude, language, religion, and ideology—comes only through experiencing the change of landscapes, senses, and feel of places that is the essence of travel.

I question this belief in the kind of "personal contact" you can get from foreign travel. You can trek all over the place and still be quite ignorant, and I suspect the locals mostly look at the tourists as ignoramuses. Why wouldn't they? And as for the "retreat[ing] behind barricades in their minds," we're all in our own mind. There's no way out. You have never traveled beyond your own skull and you never will. The promotion of travel — an expensive, time-consuming, arduous activity — as the only way to understand the world is propaganda. There are other ways to develop your mind, notably the thing you are doing right now.

ADDED: I wonder if these people who believe they're understanding the people of the world through travel ever consider spending more time in the poorer neighborhoods of their own city and getting to know the immigrants who live in their town? Why not contribute the money you would have spent on travel to a charity that serves this population and then volunteer for some activities that might involve you in real relationships with some of these immigrants? If that doesn't seem like a viable alternative to you, then why take pride in the imagined superiority of yourself as a traveler?

AND: I would love to see Skara Brae, but I'm seeing other people standing around even in the pictures on the Internet:

"U.S. Visa Process Missed San Bernardino Wife’s Zealotry on Social Media."

The NYT reports.

Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.

She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.

But does the NYT expect us to believe that U.S. immigration officials can perform the kind of fine-grained analysis that is a necessary premise for hating Donald Trump's crude proposal to exclude all Muslims?

The discovery of the old social media posts has exposed a significant — and perhaps inevitable — shortcoming in how foreigners are screened when they enter the United States, particularly as people everywhere disclose more about themselves online. Tens of millions of people are cleared each year to come to this country to work, visit or live. It is impossible to conduct an exhaustive investigation and scour the social media accounts of each of them, law enforcement officials say.

Inevitable... impossible... so they say, as they excuse their lapses.

Ms. Malik faced three extensive national security and criminal background screenings.... Ms. Malik also had two in-person interviews.... All those reviews came back clear, and the F.B.I. has said it had no incriminating information about Ms. Malik or Mr. Farook in its databases. The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have said they followed all policies and procedures....

Meanwhile, a debate is underway at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services...  over whether officers conducting interviews should be allowed to routinely use material gathered from social media....

[T]he vetting for refugees is a separate, longer and more rigorous process than the checks for K-1 and most other immigrant visas. And there is an extra layer of scrutiny for Syrians, who are referred to a national security and fraud office at the Department of Homeland Security for a final look. In that last step, officers can include a social media search, federal officials said.

Can.... But do they? So, there's "an extra layer of scrutiny" for the Syrian refugees, but

Social media comments, by themselves, however, are not always definitive evidence. In Pakistan — as in the United States — there is no shortage of crass and inflammatory language. And it is often difficult to distinguish Islamist sentiments and those driven by political hostility toward the United States....

Interesting last sentence. Is the NYT suggesting that we should discriminate against the true "Islamists" but not those who are "driven by political hostility toward the United States"? Does that mean that those who hate the United States should be kept out only if their hatred is premised on religion? How is the NYT using the word "Islamist" these days? Does it — standing alone and unmodified — include a terrorist agenda? Elsewhere, I see the word given definitions as mild as someone with "the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life." Searching the term in the NYT archive, I'm seeing a recent convention of duly appending a modifier — "radical Islamist," "Islamist extremist," "Islamist militants" — to avoid generally impugning Muslims whose religion pervades their social and political beliefs.

ADDED: I'm trying to understand where the NYT is right now. It think it's moving.

"He would say stuff like: 'There’s so much going on. There’s so many sleeper cells, so many people just waiting. When it happens, it’s going to be big. Watch.'"

"We took it as a joke. When you look at the kid and talk to him, no one would take him seriously about that.”

Said a regular at Morgan’s Tavern, about Enrique Marquez, who worked there.

Federal investigators believe that more than any other witness, Mr. Marquez, a convert to Islam, has “held the keys” to understanding what motivated [Syed] Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik....

On behalf of Mr. Farook, Mr. Marquez bought the two assault rifles used in the attack, the authorities say. He told investigators he had done so because Mr. Farook believed he could not pass a background check. Mr. Marquez has also described in detail how he and Mr. Farook had been planning another terrorist attack together in 2012....

Last year, Mr. Marquez married the Russian sister of Raheel Farook’s wife. He later told a friend and people at the bar that it was a sham marriage for immigration purposes. He told bar patrons he had been paid $5,000 or $10,000 to marry Ms. Gigliotti’s sister, Mariya Chernykh. He announced the arrangement one day when he came into the bar — which the F.B.I. visited this week — and offered to buy everyone drinks, Mr. Rodriguez, the bar patron, said.... He told Mr. Rodriguez that he had posted photographs of himself and his wife for the sake of appearances, but that Ms. Chernykh lived at her own apartment and would not so much as kiss him....

Shortly after the shooting, Mr. Marquez’s friends noticed a cryptic and poorly written post on his Facebook page: “I’m. Very sorry sguys. It was a pleasure.”

How Donald Trump managed John Dickerson on "Face the Nation" today.

Dickerson confronted Trump about the San Bernardino massacre. Note how Dickerson sets up the question with a statement that isn't part of the question...

DICKERSON: There are links between ISIS and this terror attack in San Bernardino, but there were no red flags. So, how do you stop this from happening again?

But Trump won't let him get away with that. He goes back to the unexamined premise:

TRUMP: Well, I think there are red flags. And a lot of people knew what was going on in that house or that apartment. And people were not wanting to call because they thought it would be inappropriate to call. 

Dickerson is forced to bounce off Trump:

DICKERSON: Inappropriate why?

Trump responds:

TRUMP: Well, they were saying that it was -- that they would have been profiling. And a person said, we sort of knew what was going on, but we don't want to profile. Can you believe this?

Again, Dickerson must take his cue from Trump and ask "Should there be profiling?" And Trump says: "Well, I think there can be profiling." Dickerson fails to drag a meaning of "profiling" out of Trump, and Trump doesn't get too technical about it. The people who didn't call the police were afraid to be thought of as profiling, but Trump doesn't tell us what kind of profiling could be acceptable. He sticks to saying that it's "pretty bad" not to have called the police, because "People are dead." It's a problem that "everybody wants to be politically correct" and "a lot of people are dead right now."

"ISIS 'ranks' the women, considering foreign women and converts to be especially 'valuable.' "

"According to French journalist Anna Erelle’s recent exposé, ISIS foreign fighters prefer foreign women and converts because the jihadists find Syrian women 'uppity and unaccommodating sexually.' Stressing the fact that their participation in ISIS’s jihad is best made, to quote the Manifesto from the all female al-Khansaa’ Brigade, through sedentariness, stillness and stability—marriage and motherhood—the group rewards these women to the most prized male recruits."

From "How A Woman Joins ISIS/Whatever the terror group’s propaganda, women are chattel to ISIS" in The Daily Beast.

ADDED: As you contemplate the gender politics of ISIS, please be sure to include this in the mix:



The woman is not necessarily the manipulated follower. [AND: The enemy may use the very women they find "uppity" as emissaries into our society, where they can embed and influence, taking advantage of our acceptance of strong women and our romantic-love-oriented immigration rules.]

"It is entirely possible that these two attackers were radicalized to commit this act of terror."

"And if so, it would underscore a threat we’ve been focused on for years—the danger of people succumbing to violent extremist ideologies," says President Obama in his weekly address.

[A]ll of us—government, law enforcement, communities, faith leaders—need to work together to prevent people from falling victim to these hateful ideologies....

It’s another tragic reminder that here in America it’s way too easy for dangerous people to get their hands on a gun. For example, right now, people on the No-Fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun. That is insane....

I see the proposal to try to keep guns out of the hands of "dangerous people," but what's the proposal for keeping the ideas that make them dangerous out of their heads? We "need to work together to prevent people from falling victim to these hateful ideologies," but what does this work consist of and how on earth could we do it "together"?

And what's with the passivity — the idea that these murderers "were radicalized" and that people "fall victim" to the ideologies they come to believe? It almost sounds as though Obama invites us to empathize with the terrorists, to see them as victims of their own thinking processes. A more Obama-friendly way to put that is to say that our focus should be on the larger enterprise that is winning converts. And yet it doesn't seem aimed at that larger enterprise, because he says "need to work together to prevent people from falling victim," as if he's envisioning us reaching out to the potential terrorists among us, enfolding them in neighborly love.

ADDED: I'm getting a CNN breaking news email at 6:16 Saturday night saying: "President Obama will deliver an Oval Office address at 8 p.m. ET on Sunday about terror threats in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings." I guess the weekly address has been deemed inadequate.

Is Hillary Clinton sorry she reacted to the San Bernardino massacre with a call for more gun control?

Maybe, but she's sure not going to say that. She's going to take everything she's said and claim coherence:

"I don't see any conflict at all between going after the terrorists with everything we have got... and doing more on gun safety measures. I know that we can save lives and we shouldn't be conflating the two."

Hillary is disciplined about delivering short, stock answers that don't stoke or even acknowledge controversy and that never admit mistakes. That's either aggravating, boring, or hyper-competent, depending on what you already think about her.

I see she's adopted the rebranding "gun safety." "Gun safety" has traditionally meant handling your guns safely, but now it's supposed to mean what has more commonly been called "gun control."

"Safety" sounds nicer than "control." "Control" is what a repressive state does to a cowed citizenry and what sexist men want to do to women. It's what puts the freak in control freaks. But "safety" feels like a caring mother, a loving partner, a beneficent government.

Unlike safety, "safety" is dangerous.

"As tawdry as it looked to have a barrage of reporters trampling through the residence of the deceased couple responsible for this week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, the journalists who walked through the door did the right thing."

"But the journalists who broadcast the invasion live were irresponsible. As a reporter, your primary obligation is to gather information that will help your audience understand all facets of the story. Are you likely to find information in the home of the suspects that could shed some light on the facts? You’ll never know unless you go in. But first you must determine if you have legal permission to enter the residence.... Because any information you gather by prowling through someone’s home is inherently out of context, the newsrooms that use this information have a duty to put it in context...."

Writes Kelly McBride at Poynter.

"As the San Bernardino attack was happening... Tashfeen Malik, posted on Facebook, pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi..."

... investigators believe, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the investigation.

MEANWHILE: At The Washington Post: "After Paris and California attacks, U.S. Muslims feel intense backlash."

American Muslims say they are living through an intensely painful moment and feel growing anti-Muslim sentiment.... Muslims said they are bracing for an even more toxic climate in which Americans are increasingly suspicious of Muslims. Muslims say that Americans, like many in Europe, often do not draw a distinction between radical Islamist militants, such as those associated with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the religion of Islam and its followers who have no ties to extremism.

They seem to be saying that they are afraid that they are feared. If you are afraid that other people are afraid, what should you do?

The awkward pivot from gun control to terrorism.

In the immediate aftermath of the San Bernardino massacre, and even before the cops killed Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, many commentators and politicos plugged in their usual call for gun control. As the facts about Farook and Malik emerged, the gun control message seemed rote and obtuse (or worse). The awkwardness of the pivot to a more terrorism-appropriate message is on display in this New Yorker piece by John Cassidy called "Domestic Terrorism and America’s Gun Dilemma":

Clearly, it would be in everybody’s interest if there were far fewer guns out there, especially fewer of the military-style weapons that also lend themselves to the massacre of civilians—as we discovered yet again on Wednesday, when, according to officials, a twenty-eight-year-old man, Syed Farook, and a twenty-seven-year-old woman, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at an office party in San Bernardino, California, killing at least fourteen people and injuring seventeen. But since there are already an estimated three hundred million guns in private hands (nobody knows the exact number), and U.S. gun laws are so lax that many Americans believe that they need a weapon, or many weapons, to defend themselves and their families.

With reports emerging that Farook and Malik may have had ties to radical Islamism, these concerns are going to be exacerbated. In a different country, a winning argument could be made that the threat of homegrown terrorism is another powerful reason for restricting the sale and circulation of deadly firearms. Here in the U.S., the mere mention of the “T” word, by making Americans even more fearful and providing more fodder for the gun lobby, is likely only to exacerbate the underlying problem....

Cassidy's so nervous that he nattered "exacerbate" twice in 3 sentences.

Why weren't Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik stopped before they killed?

From CNN:

Authorities later found thousands more rounds of ammunition at the couple's residence, 12 pipe bombs and hundreds of tools that "could be used to construct IEDs or pipe bombs," the [San Bernardino Police Chief] said....

Syed Rizwan Farook... was apparently radicalized and in touch with people being investigated by the FBI for international terrorism, law enforcement officials said Thursday....

Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia for several weeks in 2013 on the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are required to take at least once in their lifetime, which didn't raise red flags, said two government officials. It was during this trip that he met Malik, a native of Pakistan who came to the United States on a "fiancée visa" and later became a lawful permanent resident.

Officials had previously said that neither Farook and Malik were known to the FBI or on a list of potentially radicalized people.... Farook himself had communicated by phone and via social media with more than one person being investigated for terrorism, law enforcement officials said. A separate U.S. government official said the 28-year-old has "overseas communications and associations." 

Is it too much to expect the FBI and the immigration service to have detected what this couple had planned? And we're being asked to trust the government with screening immigrants, but they didn't catch Tashfeen Malik. 

"Mr. Farook inspected restaurants, bakeries and public swimming pools for the county department..."

"Among his duties were checking chlorine levels, screening hand-washing facilities and making sure food surfaces were clean."

[Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles] urged people not to jump to conclusions regarding a motive. “Is it work?” he said. “Rage-related? Is it mental illness? Extreme ideology?”

"As many as three attackers opened fire at a holiday party for county employees in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people..."

"... and injuring 14 others," The Washington Post reports.

“We do not know if this is a terrorist incident,” David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said at the same news conference. “It may be, or it may not be.” Burguan said that “at minimum, we have a domestic terrorist-type situation that occurred here.”...

The San Bernadino County Public Health department had rented out the room to host a holiday party, complete with Christmas trees and other decorations....

[Burguan] added that the attackers had “long guns, not handguns,” but said he did not have specific information available yet on the type of guns used.