The Dead in San Bernardino: Heartbreaking Portraits of Everyday People
Expect their murders to spur rash of useless laws to restrict everything from guns to immigration to refugee status.
As law enforcement continues to investigate the motives for the mass shooting in San Bernardino, the Los Angeles Times has released short profiles of the dead and wounded in the attack. It is difficult reading, to the say the least, to learn the details of lives snuffed out for no good goddamn reason.
A father of six. A free-spirit who befriended strangers in the grocery store checkout line. A mother of three who fled religious persecution in Iran. A woman who was 8 when she and her mother left Vietnam for a better life. The youngest was 26. The oldest was 60….
Bennetta Betbadal fled to America with her family to "escape Islamic extremism and the persecution of Christians that followed Iranian Revolution."
She was 18 at the time, according to statement released by her family. Her first stop was New York but she eventually moved to California, where she met and married Arlen Vedehyou, a police officer.
Betbadal left her Rialto home Wednesday, eager to deliver a presentation to her colleagues in the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health at their meeting at the Inland Regional Center.
She would not return to her husband and their three children, 10, 12 and 15 years old….
Tin Nguyen was just 8 when her mother fled Vietnam with her child and maternal grandparents. The family toiled and saved their paychecks to rebuild after the war in a country they believed was safe. A place where "younger people would find their rewards through education."
Nguyen graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in health sciences. For more than four years, she had worked as a county health inspector. On the job, she screened plenty of mom-and-pop restaurants, and away from work, she made sure to stay in constant touch with aunts, uncles and nearly 30 cousins ranging from age 3 to 41.
"You cannot imagine how caring she is. She had such a big heart," Emily Nguyen, 16, said of her cousin. "She never said no to us and would give you anything you asked."…
Around Lake Arrowhead, Mike Wetzel was a frequent sight, running errands with his six children in tow, three from his first marriage and three from his second.
He loved babies, said family friend Arlene Arenas, 40, and could soothe a colicky infant when no one else could.
His first year coaching local AYSO soccer, he led a team of five-year-old girls just learning the sport. Their team had a princess theme.
"He was super tall, and the littlest of girls thought he was a giant," said Arenas, whose daughter played on the team. "He had no qualms about letting them follow him around, or walking around like a monster, with the little ones shrieking and hanging off his legs."
Expect the senselessness of their deaths to be compounded by a rush to enact all sorts of gun laws and restrictions on immigrants, refugees, and American citizens that will do absolutely nothing to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
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…lives snuffed out for no good goddamn reason.
Now, before we judge let’s wait and see if our betters can ride this to common sense gun control victory in the Golden State and beyond.
Expect the senselessness of their deaths to be compounded by a rush to enact all sorts of gun laws and restrictions on immigrants, refugees, and American citizens that will do absolutely nothing to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
“[insert victim’s first name]’s Law”
Yep, restrictions on immigrants would have absolutely nothing to do to prevent mass murder by a fucking immigrant, you asshole.
Yikes! Zero to 60 in like, 2 seconds. Calm down, bro.
Meh, the knucklehead has no idea what I support or do not – some coming here lately have been around just to vent spleen.
Well, it wasn’t addressed at you, but at the Reason author
Was that a GOP rhetorician comment?
See, if we had more immigant restrictions at least a couple of these people would not even have been here to be killed by some other immigant. They would have been safe and sound in Iran and Vietnam. Well, maybe not safe and sound – but we wouldn’t have to be aware of them being brutally murdered if they had been brutally murdered in some far-off land.
Yarr, ye beat me to it.
The truth is that these deaths are on the open-borders crowd. They say they love immigants, but look how many died at the hands of one of their beloved. Shameful.
Huh. One of the shooters was born in the U.S. The other was married to him, which means even closed-border advocates would have considered it legit for her to be here.. No “open borders” philosophy involved.
The children of Islamic immigrants are far more likely to be radicals than their parents. The open borders “philosophy” is merely one generation removed. But the multicult philosophy is ever present, as evidenced by the people tying themselves in knots to say that Islam has nothing to do with it.
Yeah, I’m a closed border advocate (or if you want to get technical a “be more selective with who you let in” advocate), but I would defend the right of an American man to bring his wife into the country, or of an American woman to bring her husband into the country, even if the wife or husband is a sketchy furriner.
I think this comes under the 9th Amendment.
Or of a citizen property owner to sponsor an individual immigrant with his own resources, not that of the tax payer. If the people who are so desperate for more Muslims in this country would put them up in their own house, that’d be one thing. Asserting that I must pay for it and accommodate them regardless of my will, that’s something else.
I don’t know about you, but I care a lot more about my fellow Americans being killed than foreigners. And yeah, the murder rate in Iran and Vietnam is pretty low
The professional gun outrage community blatantly sees zero fucking hypocrisy in maligning constitutional gun rights for all American citizens when a minuscule number of them get twisted and murderous while at the parallel time these same shrieking imbeciles DEMAND that Americans stop associating a small number of twisted and murderous Islamists with the rest of Muslim culture.
What the real fuck, man?
If only it were a small number. There are a decent number of Muslims that support terrorism, even if they aren’t pulling the trigger themselves:
http://www.thereligionofpeace……-Polls.htm
And an overwhelming majority of our fellow countrymen would violently throw us in jail or have us killed, for not complying with their righteous moral code, which they’ve enshrined in law.
Not seeing much of a difference there. The actual terrorists are just more efficient.
In military jargon – the terrorists are the tip of the spear. The rest are the supply and logistics pouges.
Do you think importing millions of religious fundamentalists – with a considerably more strict moral code – will make that problem better or worse?
Religious fundamentalists support the War On Drugs, so they make terrific allies of statists.
We don’t have a problem. The only place there is a problem is between your ears.
What we had here were two criminals who committed an act of violence. In the process of committing that act, they were brought to justice. The system worked EXACTLY as designed. Remember the system that says individual liberty will not be traded for security?
A republic, if you can keep it…
Free Society…the closed borders anarchist.
You mind arguing that position from first principles?
I already have, numerous times, F d. A the statist libertarian. You mind arguing for the existence of a state from first principles?
Sure:
My first principles maximize liberty.
1. A person may do a they wish, provided, they do not infringe on the rights of others in doing so.
This maximizes liberty by setting the only boundary on my liberty at the logical place of where it takes liberty away from someone else.
2. The only legitimate function of government is to protect the rights of the individual.
This maximizes liberty by providing a common defense capable of repelling attacks that will surely come from those more powerful than me or other nation states. Without such protection I will eventually have NO liberty and NO property.
Your turn. Tell me how your brand of anarchy legitimately restricts freedom of movement.
It doesn’t, no anarchist would restrict freedom of movement. However, there is no common defense that comes from the state. To cede our right to armed self defense to an authority is to elevate the authority above the individual.
Do you think importing millions of religious fundamentalists
Easy now. You only have so many pairs of pants to go to.
They have no principles, just principals.
What the real fuck indeed. Cognitive dissonance is a hallmark of these times. Facts. Facts only get in the way of the narrative. You need to feel the right emotions and trust that your rush to judgment is best for all Americans. If you don’t feel the way I do you are a monster. I see no difference between all American citizens who support the second amendment and Adam Lanza.
Expect the senselessness of their deaths to be compounded by a rush to enact all sorts of gun laws and restrictions on immigrants, refugees, and American citizens that will do absolutely nothing to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
The silver lining in this is all of the economic stimulation that will occur in the garment cleaning industry.
We’ll shit our pants to prosperity!
And if we eat our shit we’ll shit again! It’s like a perpetual motion machine fueled by shit!
Reading the list, I get the impression all of the listed victims were employed by the county government, in furtherance of the intitiation of force for various sorts of noble and altruistic reasons… but initiation of force just the same. There was an unbalanced fellow in Kileen, Texas, bureaucrats picked on over his backyard fence repairs. He soon shot up the cafeteria frequented by employees of the benign regulatory institution, and this never made its way out of local news coverage. The only political take-away I get from these events is to continue to vote against the initiation of force, hence against Kristallnacht gun laws.
” It is difficult reading, to the say the least, to learn the details of lives snuffed out for no good goddamn reason.”
Nick is slowly going bonkers. How does knowing their personal details increase the level of the tragedy for any sane thinking person? Anybody should be maximally horrified by the murders regardless of the personal details of the victims.
And “no good goddamn reason”? Hyperbole does not impress.
Time to retire the jacket.
Time to retire the jacket.
Perhaps he get a decent trade-in allowance on a cocktail dress.
How does knowing their personal details increase the level of the tragedy for any sane thinking person? Anybody should be maximally horrified by the murders regardless of the personal details of the victims.
Let’s all hope that your life is equally meaningless.
Or equally meaningful, which is my point.
You have a point, other than aping a little yippy dog?
pot/kettle/black. Fuck off asswipe.
Withering retort. I’m finished.
Seriously, don’t you have other people, someplace else, whom you can annoy with your unique insight? You shouldn’t waste your raw talent just here.
WHYCOME DOES COSMOS TALK LIKE A FAGGOTS
Generally, human beings feel a greater sense of empathy for people as they learn more about them and the faceless stranger becomes nearer to the viewer’s own heart. Putting a face to the string of characters that make up the name can be a big difference in level of empathy. Learning personal details, and how innocent or mundane or inspiring or common they are, makes the connection even stronger, and the misfortune produces a stronger sense of sadness.
Do I need to quote Adam Smith?
See this sentence: “Anybody should be maximally horrified by the murders regardless of the personal details of the victims.”
If you need help feeling empathy for the victims in this case, there is something wrong.
What Nick is implying is that it would be less devastating if more of the victims were 5’s and 6’s and not so many 9’s and 10’s. I find the vibe of his thesis creepy. I have no beef with sharing the details of the victims (although I do hope such disclosure isn’t causing more pain).
Aren’t all of those folks protected by California Kristallnacht gun laws?. If those laws really are effective and keep shooters from gunning down large groups of legally-disarmed docile citizens, then this whole thing is just a media hoax and we can all to back to worrying about real problems. If the Kristallnacht gun laws made things worse, then perhaps there’s a lesson in this for California voters and the kind of parties they support.
Ah! A shimmering in The Force. Another denizen of Altruria has awakened from slumber and come to a Realization.
Putting a face to the string of characters that make up the name can be a big difference in level of empathy.
Unfortunately it also generates maximum feelz, fuel for moral righteousness and indignation, and dudgeon-making material for the “Don’t just stand there-do something” crowd(s).
Your confusing outrage with coercion.
Any thinking person should be outraged over this slaughter. All of these people killed had families, hopes, dreams, etc. Hundreds of other people, friends and family, will be left to pick up the pieces in their overwhelming grief.
It’s easy to lose sight of this, when death is reduced to a statistic. That’s all that Obama’s drone victims are to the left-fascists, a number. Their lives are meaningless to these partisan shitstains. To the right-fascists, muslim lives are meaningless.
Unfortunately, an assload of people, including here, have taken that outrage and turned it bugnuts fuckery.
It’s the other side of the yokel invasion: whiny, little bitches.
Winston can command an army, now.
So many commenters losing their minds lately.
Lately? This forum went balls-to-the-wall wackadoodle around the time of the Ebola panic.
balls-to-the-wall wackadoodle
Pornhub’s new slogan?
I thought we had peaked with gay marriage over the summer. Count this place as another casualty of Islamist violence.
There’s no such thing as peak yokel.
So many commenters losing their minds lately.
I think a whole lot of commenters are just feeling like they can now express what they thought all along.
Please tell me that you’re already expressing yourself sufficiently and that there are no deeper depths of your psyche that have yet to be exposed to us.
*thinks of the Pelosi slashfic and cringes*
Please tell me that you’re already expressing yourself sufficiently and that there are no deeper depths of your psyche that have yet to be exposed to us.
Why is the sun suddenly starting to go out?
[manic giggle]
Ayn Rand would have written an essay explaining why they all deserved to die.
“Oh, how cruel!”
“Don’t you believe in karma, madame?” Francisco would have asked gravely.
(Don’t come crying to me, I voted libertarian).
How much Islamist terrorism do they have in Japan, Nick?
Would you say that it is more or less than the amount in the US or France?
How many Japanese in America commit crimes with guns? About the same as in Japan.
Who fucking cares? Both are insignificant.
Your odds of an American being killed by a terrorist are one in 20,000,000 in a given year. You as likely to be struck by lightning twice in the same period.
and the odds that a terrorist is motivated by Islam?
Who cares? Their motivation is irrelevant. Only their action is moral or not and therefore punishable or not.
Is Free Society, advocating a suppression of free thought, ideas…..liberty?
So the motivations of the most recurrent form of terrorism doesn’t matter. Nothing to do with ideology…
Is F d A advocating putting his head in the sand?
Leaving aside your claim that Islam is not in direct opposition to free thought and liberty…
That’s a nice collection of arguments, those strawmen won’t know what hit them. One point I find particularly hilarious though…
So you’re telling me that the Syrian refugees are renouncing Islam as they flee to the west? They don’t bring it with them? No Islamists in Europe, got it.
They were safe from the warzone about ten to twenty borders before they get to a western country’s border. They’re welfare shopping and Europeans and Americans are under no obligation to hand over their wealth to these people. If they want to do so charitably, that’s great but tax funded handouts aren’t charity, tax funded handouts are criminal.
My vote says to sell those Syrians Colts and Winchesters, and tickets back to Syria to defeat their oppressors.
My records indicate that a hell of a lot more crime/shootings/terrorism are the cost of being captured by a coercive altruist society. Soviet and National Socialism come to mind immediately, and those were even worse than the Nixon Administration, I’m given to understand.
Brace yourselves for the derp
Lee G. Copypasta terrorist.
It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
Somehow I knew DU would be on a tear this morning.
I’m not even going to promise to kill you last.
With no guns, how are you going to accomplish that?
DAMN IT…..
I’ll drop a safe or a piano on you. Stand right there.
LOL! The war on gunz guarantees firearms will be easier to get.
So no self-defense for anyone out in public. That will be really convenient for future shooters.
How good is a gun for self-defense if you have to leave it at home?
And, of course, if the point of leaving it at home is to stop people from taking their guns outside and shooting up some place… why do you expect murderers to respect that?
I like the cameras on gunz angle. You can tell this guy is really trying to be forward thinking in his gun paranoia.
The shooters like it too – get to show off your work and further scare people.
I believe that the slave traffic one was something the Framers only forebore to repeal before 1808. Politics is a lot simpler in bills than it is in acts with the votes to get passed and signed. Try getting elected to the board of a trade or professional association as a libertarian. It is valuable experience and relevant to changing laws.
We’ll they tried for so long to just get people to forget it like the Ninth and Tenth, but that isn’t working any more.
I’m thinking if the gun grabbers did go full dictator on the issue it would lead to a minor civil war at the very least.
And the footage of all the police arresting citizens and confiscating guns wouldn’t fly for long… I mean look at then number of people who just decided to ignore Connecticut’s gun laws… and multiply that across the nation.
And asking rural police – who are often friends and family members – to go and confiscate guns from the local community. Yeah – good luck with that.
It’s quite astounding how stupid they are on this topic.
They’re terrified that the income tax out of the 1848 communist manifesto might quit working and get repealed. Looters are real attached to taking what ain’t theirs, and do not appreciate anyone being in a position to disobey or stand them at defiance – like Patrick Henry and his pals.
It’d take one or two Waco type assaults enforcing a hypothetical confiscation law, for many gun owners to feel that the best defense is a good offense. I wonder how close we came to one with the whole Cliven Bundy brouhaha?
I agree with you about the minor civil war. I actually think it’d lead to a partial Balkanization of the US, for a variety of reasons.
I’m not all that confident it would go down that way. I actually believe that they’d be mostly successful, if tried.
We’re a nation of rule followers now and who wants to get themselves and possibly their family killed over that? Police already know that they can get away with murder with only the thinnest sheen of justification.
“He had an armory inside his house.” NOT GUILTY.
No we aren’t. Leave the cities and nobody follows rules. We don’t obey traffic rules, zoning regulations unless the town gets tough, and not gun laws at all.
Laying siege to the homes of gunowners for no crime other than ownership would absolutely start a civil war.
Most of the ordinary citizens I run into are too scared to register to vote. I am hard pressed to imagine that crowd of pants-wetters lifting a finger to resist professional looter hordes. I gave someone a Reason subscription and he spent the year peeking out the blinds and worrying the FBI, CIA, PIGS, and the entire rest of the alphabet were out to get him or at least blacklist him somehow for taking it out of his mailbox.
True on the Coasts. Not at all true in flyover land.
That’s most of the population.
I have no doubt that even if my neighbors in the DC burbs did own a firearm, they would dutifully report for confiscation and sneer and snub anyone who didn’t equally comply.
You guys are overestimating the backbone of the bulk of the people in this country. They’d see the horrible videos of these unpatriotic dissenters being gunned down on the news and fall right in line.
Not here.
Believe me, I’d love to be wrong. But, I spend a significant amount of time around the average hoi-polloi. There would be much tut-tutting.
I think we’re just better at keeping our heads down. nobody at the office knows about mine.
DC burbs – we’ve identified your disconnect.
As usual it would depend… I can’t imagine it going over very well in Texas, or many of the Southern/Western states. As others said, it would be the rural areas that would be the last to give in. And the sheer number of guns out there… I certainly wouldn’t want to be a police officer and have that job. There would be large area that would simply ignore the law.
And there’s this: http://cspoa.org/sheriffs-gun-rights/
There would be wide-spread non-compliance. I think there would be civil unrest. I can see some states trying to secede.
I’ve long said that a repeal of the 2A would be one of the few things that could spark major civil unrest these days. I don’t know about a civil war, but I can see many states seceding.
I do not think many in the Northeast would be eager to give up their guns.
If those states don’t pay their share of the Fed debt on their way out, secession would lead to civil war. Heck, secession equaled civil war the last time it was tried.
I don’t believe secession a la the Civil War would be the way it goes down, as opposed to the geographically distributed insurgency that we saw during the Revolutionary War. Every state in the Union has its fair share of neo-Patriots and neo-Tories.
You can tell they are serious by the all caps.
Has this dude ever heard of #BlakcLivesMatter?
Does he realize he needs to the States to also agree to real the 2A?
No, he probably does not.
It’s been pretty strange that the collective narrative is still about gun control, and hasn’t yet pivoted back to the refugee issue and not stereotyping immigrants or Muslims.
In times of crisis most people revert to the level of their training, so…
Nice.
Cool. I’m sure you have a plan for talking away all these guns that doesn’t involve using guns.
So can we begin by disarming the IRS and ATF?
Bennetta Betbadal’s story is rough. I wonder if the asshole knew it and it was part of his motivation?
We’ll never know unless he documented it.
From CNN:
But sure, let’s not rush to the conclusion. Who knows why a Muslim couple decided to shoot dozens of people in San Bernardino? Only yokeltarians, who are just like progs, would assume now that it was an act of Islamic terrorism.
Also pay no attention to the fact the shooters went to a lot of effort to hide their digital footprint before they attacked: smashed their old cell phones with hammers, used a new burner phone, removed a hard drive from one of their computers in their house, etc…. Well, other than pledging solidarity with ISIS on Facebook, that is.
I know that if I wanted to go postal, I’d totally remove and hide my hard drive. Plus make a bunch of pipe bombs I left at home and didn’t use against my co-workers.
One reason for the digital scrubbing may have been to try and hide any tracks or evidence linking them to other militant groups. Like some of the guys that neighbors saw were over at their house. Don’t be surprised to see some stuff blow up in S. California in the very near future.
“Don’t be surprised to see some stuff blow up in S. California in the very near future.”
That’s a cheering thought.
But as long as we’re cheering each other up, why assume the attacks will be confined to S. California?
Sniff sniff… I smell the blood pressure of a Republican berserker. If it’s not ISIS it’s the G.O. Pee-in-a-Dixie-cup collective…
I ran an interesting little test this morning. I compared per capita gun ownership rates and per capita homicide rates by country, both from Wikipedia. Now, I’ll admit, this is a VERY back of the envelope measure. There’s a lot more data scrubbing that would almost certainly be necessary to get scientific unimpeachability. But, the correlation came out at -0.15. The negative correlation suggests that more gun ownership is associated with fewer homicides, but the 0.15 suggests that it’s not a particularly strong correlation.
Make of that what you will.
France suffered more casualties (murders and injuries) from mass public shootings in 2015 than the US has suffered during Obama’s entire presidency (508 to 424).
http://crimeresearch.org/2015/…..-to-424-2/
I’m sure those facts of reality will offend many people of faith.
Michael Wetzel was actually my second cousin. I never met him, but he was the godson of my aunt and uncle who I’m pretty close to. Really rough time for them, not to mention his family of course. Just sad.
That’s rough, buddy. And he had six kids. Damn.
Sorry to hear that man.
I consider myself an honorary Wetzel (since that’s how most mispronounce my actual and very similar last name), so it’s always sad to see one of the extended family go down.
Here’s a topic to bring together the pantshitters and non-panshitters:
Why the fuck do we know nothing about the wife? I can’t find a single picture of her, all the stories are about her husband. I mean, she participated in the murders too. Is it just that they can’t find anything or they aren’t trying because they are pushing a narrative?
*checks underwear* If the wife really was an “operative” she could have gone out of her way not to be photographed. But a passport, or some sort of photo from the visa vetting process should exist. I’m sure something will pop up soon enough.
I’m sure it will but there’s almost nothing out there at all. It’s really strange.
It takes about 5 minutes to pull a DMV photo. I’d find it hard to believe that she didn’t have a DL or ID card.
Apa, if it’s true that she came in on a K-1, then there must be, at the very least, a headshot picture of her, because the Visa application requires it.
My guess is it’s part ‘downplay the S. Asian/Muslimness of the attackers’, part ‘not let the bad guys we’re still hunting know that we know her social contacts’ (which could be inferred from whatever published pictures they wanted to use). I’m not sure how common her name is in Pakistan. I have seen photos of a woman with her name, posing with the rest of her class at a Pakistan aeronautical training center. Whether that implies she’s a pilot, or has piloting skills, or knows her way around an airport, I don’t know.
If you want a real wild curveball, their activities, home, travels on the day of the attack, etc… were awfully close to San Bernardino Int’l Airport. The airport is primarily a GA spot these days, but they do have a lot of firefighting a/c there, and some of them can be very large. It might be easier to boost one of them than to try and commandeer a large passenger aircraft these days. Any bets on whether one of the towers in Century City will hold up any better from a DC-10 air tanker smacking it, than did WTC 1 or 2?
I was thinking more along the lines of “only men do these types of things and if a woman did then she must have been brainwashed/abused so lets not focus on her.”
Well, maybe ISIS isn’t cis-centric, you shitlord!!
Well, we know the Taliban aren’t.
Do they allow headshots of women wrapped up like mummies?
No, they do not.
There was litigation in 2003 in Florida on whether a woman had to show her unveiled face for a DL photo: she did. Current Illinois guidelines for photos may be found here, and state:
According to this site, State Department visa photo guidelines are:
Or what HM said.
I think I heard some reports that she was a pharmacist? Not especially relevant…
Wrong. That would signal meth-cooker to any self-respecting Republican prohibitionist.
Once speech is regulated, we are only arguing about the appropriate penalties.
I think everybody does, and attention is turning to her in a big way, especially given her abiding mysteriousness and the shout-out to ISIS. I’ve already seen speculation that she was the one who radicalized him, not vice-versa.
His beard? I do not want to say that they got what was coming to them…
It is cruel. They say The Prophet was born with a beard…
Pure speculation, but I could see this being motivated by a radicalized desire to defend his faith without being coordinated or directly linked to ISIS or some other group. “Inspired by” rather than “directed by”.
Televangelized by? converted by? enlightened by? educated by? indoctrinated by? brainwashed by?
Maybe they were serving pork, and it offended her faithy sensibilities? Kind of a form of Hate Diet or Microaggressive Chewing. We must be sensitive and respectful of these things.
“As law enforcement continues to investigate the motives for the mass shooting in San Bernardino, . . .”
I don’t suppose the whole world has gone retarded. I guess law enforcement is just trying to put together a narrative for the public about how we shouldn’t blame them and what they’re going to do to make sure this never happens again?
And it’s possible that they’re genuinely just lost in the details. Each of the terrorists who participated in 9/11 may have done so for their own reasons. Maybe one was pissed off about our support for Israel. Maybe another wanted to impress his big brother and be part of something historical, spectacular and big. Maybe they all did it for different reasons. But who in their right mind would hesitate to call 9/11 terrorism regardless of the particulars of their motives?
Whatever else terrorism is, it is also targeting civilians to make a spectacle and spread fear. Let them look for the specifics of the motives all they want, it can’t be wrong to call it terrorism.
“Investigators think that as the San Bernardino, California, attack was happening, female shooter Tashfeen Malik posted a pledge of allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook”
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/04/…..index.html
Yes, but we still don’t know if it was terrorism until we understand why she felt like she needed to write that. Maybe she was emotionally neglected as a child. Maybe she suffered from PTSD.
An armed robbery isn’t an armed robbery until you understand why it was committed, doncha know.
All we know for certain is that we need more gun control. Even the President said so, and he was very confident about gun control–even when he knew less about her motives than we do now!
Said American native born citizen would not have been an American native born citizen, given that his parents would have been prevented from immigrating in the first place.
Besides which, Nick’s emphasis was on preventing such a thing from reoccurring (or, at least, reducing its likelihood) — which curtailment of immigration from those regions would do much to help with.
Maybe said curtailment shouldn’t be done for some other reason that outweighs this, but the fact that Muslims in the country are a necessary condition in order to have Islamic terrorist attacks occur (and that more Muslims increases those odds,all things being equal) seems to me almost trivially true — the type of thing that anyone not blinded by ideology would acknowledge as true.
You do know that non-Muslims can turn into Muslims, right?
It takes just just one Youtube video!
This One Weird Trick Will Make Anyone Into A Muslim (Secularists Hate Him!!!)
It’s more of a life-hack.
That deserves Swissy-level eye narrowing.
*narrows gaze, quite fiercely*
Sure, same way non-communists can become communists or non-fascists can become fascists. Still doesn’t make it a good idea to import large numbers of adherents to either of these ideologies if one’s goals are to avoid the evils of that ideology put into practice — especially when your native population is not prone to adopting these ideologies.
You could say the same about socialism and various sub-groups in the US. I’d rather not have NOI joined by the rest of the crazy strains of Islam percolating in the Middle East.
I guess I just don’t get what the big deal is when we’re literally surrounded by slavers, all the time.
All my neighbors probably support the drug war. Some enormous percentage of Americans are moral monsters. But I’m supposed to be concerned about whether immigrants worship Allah.
I grade on a curve. Just like I can prefer the state of liberty in the US to that of, say, Nazi Germany or the former USSR, I can also prefer it to the Middle East. I can also point out that one reason for that state is the state of Islam, and that immigrants who bring and maintain Islam into the country are more likely to make the country worse for it than better.
Bigger deal for Europe than for us, I suppose.
Europeans have to wait in line for the government to shoot back for them. Still, like Han Solo, I?d rather have them than me stuck in an “armless zone.” And it’s their former colonies arriving in Paris to collect on karma.
Clearly, then, we need Common-Sense Islam Control. Damn the First Amendment, we need to save lives!
Lives? Jerry Brown sez you’d better damn the 2nd Amendment too then…
There was a 1903 law barring entry of anarchists, terse and nicely written.
You could punish 3 million people for the crimes of a few hundred, but it seems counterproductive, even as horrible as those crimes are.
It’s not like there aren’t solutions. First, there’s no way that the NSA didn’t know that this couple was in contact with jihadis. As long we’re gathering that data, we need to dedicate more resources to surveilling the people who are very likely to be bad guys, and (for noncitizens) finding excuses to expel them. For citizens, once the red flags hit a certain threshold, that’s an appropriate time to run one of the entrapment schemes that we rag on the FBI for; once you’re reasonably certain someone is going to kill eventually, get them to reveal the monster inside in a controlled fashion and put them away.
More importantly, people need to drop SJW/multiculti values and be proud and assertive about our liberalism. Our cultural spokespeople should directly attack those parts of Islam, as practiced, that are incompatible with it. The Mormons are a religion, oft persecuted, but our society still somehow convinced them to drop the explicitly racist parts of their faith; we can do the same with theocracy, subjugation of women, violent homophobia and bigotry, and so on. Not everyone will go along, but it will leave the irredeemably bad ones more isolated. More people speaking out also means any given person is less likely to be a target.
It’s children fanatics brainwash with mystical superstition. Try convincing a grownup the Devil is hiding under their bed, or that Invisible Spirits tell only you secret truths unknowable by scientific methods. This is why all of them are so dead set on forcing women to reproduce.
It may be prudent to restrict immigration from countries where there are a lot of anti-American terrorists–regardless of the religion of the immigrant in question. I think it may be prudent to find ways to assist refugees from such conflict areas without bringing them within our borders–regardless of whether they are Christian or Buddhist or some other religion.
I’m not sure Gillespie is wrong to suggest that wouldn’t prevent native born Americans from carrying out terrorist attacks.
Just like banning guns wouldn’t prevent terrorists from using drones with explosives or some other fresh new hell.
1) “Senseless” isn’t quite the word to use for a motivated attack.
Every attack is motivated by something. 9/11 was motivated by something, but all those victims died for no good reason whatsoever. No one was better off because of 9/11–certainly not Al Qaeda. 9/11 was a strategic blunder for them.
These deaths in San Bernardino were also senseless in that the terrorists haven’t made any kind of progress on anything anyone should want by murdering these people. Even if the attack was specifically ordered by the Islamic State, it accomplished nothing in that no one is better off because of this attack.
Not really. 19 guys with pocket knives and what, 10 or so folks with a few guns have the whole Western World shitting their pants and changing the foundations of their societies. This is exactly what Bin Laden planned. They’re playing the long game and so far it’s going pretty good for them (their deaths mean no more to them than ours do).
The ATF killed every man, woman and child at a hippie christian compound in Waco, and all got paid for doing it. It was also, BTW, a gun control law enforcement action. Where’s all the bawling and sobbing about the 80 they killed?
Amen.
RIP.
When the Branch Davidian genocide began I was in a large bookstore in Austin. An obvious narc strolled in and began a speech to all and sundry about “them crazy people”… Naturally I left immediately, and only later realized this was an Inner Party attempt at spin control agitprop.
Wife in San Bernardino Attack Pledged ISIS Allegiance, Officials Say
It’s the New York Times, so that is how we know it is true.
“Carlos U.S. 4 minutes ago
It’s getting harder to not think about a potential shooting or generally being in danger every time I leave my house…”
The terrorists have won.
Well, they have beaten that guy, for sure. Me, I’ve been in worse, so I think I will just go about my normal life.Sucks to be Carlos U.S.
No, Jimmy, that’s your dick talking.
FWIW, there are now plenty of pictures of the wife available to the public. MSNBC and CNN aired interviews where the cameraman and crew were filming the interior of the shooters’ apartment. Among the effects were personal pictures and photo albums.
Weird, I’d have thought it was still a crime scene, but I guess not.
This “shooting” has all the earmarks of a false flag event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrA9KYuE8y4
When selective disarmers come to me with repeal the second amendment plans I try to change the subject to repealing the personal income tax as a dress rehearsal. The corporations can pay the income tax, I tell them, especially since bribing the Supreme Court to let them buy elections. And tax repeal gets rid of a lot of IRS and Treasury guns, makes citizens feel less need for them, and shifts burden onto corporations the disarmers seem to dislike. Besides, it’d be good practice for repealing stuff in general.
And you’re still a coward too scared to post under your regular handle.
Go easy on him, he’s a state worshiping social contractor. He doesn’t know many arguments besides “if you don’t like it you can geeeet out”.
Cowardly fuck.
I can’t believe somebody with the handle “Shut the fuck up” would say something like that.
Do you ever reflect on how pathetic you are, or is this something you do without even thinking?
Our new trolls are lazy as hell.
Fuck off, you are just another 13 year old girl.
I take it there was a comment that got deleted?
You two are a match made in heaven.
I know you’re a gigantic moron and everything, but Jesus. I’m impressed.
If so, I should really do something about my dad bod.
Not new. That’s a regular who’s too much a coward to post under his own handle.
*sniff* You’re all SO MEAN!
(for those unawares: ‘shut the fuck up’ posted something stupid and shitty, and it has now been disappeared, like the trolls of old)
I thought it was one of Mary’s. The style is similar to some of her more combative posts.
Life’s too short.
Yes, impotent troll called you an asshole.
Gosh… I’m gonna miss that wisdom something awful.