Congressman Palazzo: President fights 2nd Amendment harder than terrorism

And I’m Steve Inskeep.

Obama reaffirmed the strategy announced last month to send Special Operations forces to Iraq and Syria, along with Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempt to rally allies to end the civil war in Syria, but stopped short of any significant military initiative. “This is not a question about whether people are going to play by the rules, they’re not”. At least one of the suspected shooters in the past week’s massacre in San Bernardino expressed support for the Islamic State online. And he noted that stopping such attacks is different than detecting complicated plots like 9/11.

Even the Democrats’ presidential frontrunner is questioning the current strategy to defeat ISIS. NPR’s Scott Horsley reports.

Obama spoke just four days after U.S.-born Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his Pakistani wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, opened fire on a holiday party for civil servants in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. But by Friday afternoon he and his staff knew he would have to speak up.

The president also stressed that it was “the responsibility of all Americans” to reject discrimination. “But it’s also important for us to recognize it for what it is, and I think that’s, you know, why the president has taken the approach that he has”.

The young Muslim couple who mounted the California attack “had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West”.

Obama says the killers had stockpiled weapons and ammunition.

He did call for a review of the visa waiver program for people seeking to come to the US and said he would urge private companies and law enforcement leaders to work together to ensure potential attackers can’t use technology to evade detection. No longer are terrorists seeking to commit multifaceted attacks, such as 9/11, but they have “turned to less complicated acts of violence”, such as the San Bernardino shootings. Such attacks require less coordination and are thus harder for authorities to detect. “Our success won’t depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values or giving in to fear”, he said.

But Obama emphasized that such backlash and division is exactly what the terrorist group wants. Maybe we should start calling him Sergeant Shultz instead.

Obama’s speech was likely to leave his Republican critics unsatisfied. But he offered no U.S. policy shift to confront what he called a called a “new phase” in the terrorist threat. He once derisively dismissed the group as a terrorist junior varsity team, said before the Paris attacks that it was contained in Syria and Iraq, and as recently as last week said there weren’t credible known threats against the U.S. “American troops should not be engaged in perpetual warfare in the Middle East”.

But since President Obama said nothing new, nothing will be remembered.

Americans must not push Muslims away, nor should Muslims ignore the threat of extremism in their communities, he said. “I immediately stated that I agreed with that goal and that I would back the president once he laid out and fully committed to an effective strategy to accomplish it. To date – and tonight’s status-quo speech was no exception – he has done neither”.