“I don’t know whether we’ll succeed, but at least we’ll show the people of California, of CT, of SC and of OR that somebody is listening and reacting to the pain that millions of people are feeling all across the country”.
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Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook were killed in a shootout with police after the Wednesday attack during a holiday party at a social services agency in San Bernardino, California. There have been more mass shootings than calendar days this year.
But the attack in Southern California has again heightened public fears and renewed criticism from Obama’s detractors that he has underestimated the Islamic State and played down the threats of radical Muslim organizations.
In an English-language broadcast on the group’s Bayan radio station, the extremist group said “soldiers of the caliphate” had conducted the attack, the official said.
Alan Lizotte, a professor of criminal justice at the State University of NY at Albany, said secondary firearm transfers – private sales of weapons between individuals that don’t involve a gun dealer or manufacturer – are hard to track.
The couple had not drawn the attention of the FBI or other federal authorities that seek to identify and track potential terrorists, even though Farook had used the Internet to make contact with people from the Shabab, an Islamist militant group based in Somalia, and the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-linked group in Syria, a federal law enforcement official said.
The couple attempted to destroy evidence, including crushing two mobile phones and discarding them in a rubbish bin, said David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.
Critics say Obama has underestimated the group, noting earlier remarks mocking the group as a “JV team” and claiming they had been “contained”. The massacre, if proven to be terror-related, would be the deadliest such assault on American soil since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In 2012, Michalik saw a rush of customers and gun owners who came in to load up on more guns but this time Michalik said he’s seeing a different customer-group.
Bomb equipment, weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition were later found in their home.
On Friday lawyers representing the attackers’ family said the relatives were “in complete shock” and that they had no idea the two had been capable of such an attack. “The women (in the family) communicated with her. Farook didn’t want anyone else to talk to her”, he said, adding that the men in the family had never even seen Malik’s face. But nothing ever changes, and it won’t change until voters elect leaders at all levels who are angry enough and determined enough to try to enact change, rather than throwing up their hands and saying there is nothing we can do … And this week, 14 people slaughtered in San Bernardino, Calif….
President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande are stressing cooperation between their governments and with their allies to wipe out terrorism.
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Former classmate Abdia Rani told AFP that she had “gradually turned religious”, and over time became more serious and withdrawn. “They get put on there based on credible information and suspicion that they should not be put on a plane inside our country or coming into our country”, Clinton said at a campaign event in Sioux Falls, Iowa.
