In what The Washington Post called a “deliberate” decision, U.S. President Barack Obama chose to stand up behind a podium while delivering his address to the nation Sunday night. Obama spoke “to tell the world that the United States will not take the threat of terrorism sitting down. So he didn’t sit down.”
Obama used his speech as a focal point for conversation regarding Wednesday’s attack in San Bernardino, California, in which 14 people were killed. He defined the attack staunchly as “terrorism,” addressed the growing threat of the Islamic State and demanded stricter gun laws in the United States, much to the chagrin of conservatives.
He promised to “destroy” ISIL and told us the San Bernardino shooting was a “terrorist attack by a couple who had gone down the ‘dark path of radicalization’ and embraced a ‘perverted’ form of Islam.”
Obama argued it should be harder to buy assault weapons like the ones used in the San Bernardino shooting. He also called on Congress to ban people on a no-fly list from buying firearms. “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon? This is a matter of national security,” he said, according to a transcript from the White House.
Obama also called for further background checks to be done on visas of those who have been to war-torn nations.
“What we can do, and must do, is make it harder for them to kill,” Obama said.
What’s troubling about Obama’s remarks is that he didn’t seem to tell us anything new. An undoubtedly eloquent speaker, he comes forward and rephrases the sentences we’ve been conditioned to hear time and again. The more informed citizens among us already know about the government’s allied actions against ISIL, our teaming up with France and Obama’s decision not to put boots on the ground in Syria or other war torn countries in the Middle East. And those more informed citizens are arguably the only people who felt compelled to watch Obama’s address in the first place.
Obama said what he always says about gun control — that it must be more regulated, that we are in danger, that semiautomatic weapons promote violence and killing. But time after time, mass shooting after mass shooting, Obama stands in front of the nation and calls for action, and time after time our Congress is too influenced by the poison that is the National Rifle Association to think for a second about people’s lives instead of money. We must put our right to live ahead of our right to shoot.
Obama has inadvertently warned us not to go outside. During this worldwide travel advisory, we’ve been told by our own government to be wary, but not wary enough to stop mass marketing weapons designed to kill. Obama has tried countless times to combat this, but to no avail. We want him to take a bolder stand against violence as his time in office is coming to a close, but we realize this may place “warning” stickers on the foreheads of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O’ Malley as presidential candidates for the Democratic Party.
It’s heartbreaking, truly — we’ve become so desensitized to the phrase “mass shooting” that we need Obama to define this San Bernardino attack as “terrorism” before we take it seriously.
Of course we associate the word with Sept. 11 — we are products of our time, after all. Terrorism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.” But what goals do we define as political? Does Robert Lewis Dear count as a terrorist because he shot people at a government sponsored Planned Parenthood office? Does Adam Lanza count as a terrorist because he shot unarmed children and teachers at a government funded elementary school?
This fight against the Islamic State has almost a sense of hopelessness none of us wants to admit. The extremist group is only so powerful because they target those who are vulnerable and willing. Obama isn’t wrong. We can’t determine when ideologies will change, and we can’t send another generation of young men and women into a war that has no foreseeable end date. It’s baffling that those on a “no fly-list” even have access to guns in the first place. It’s much too easy to purchase a gun in this country, and that is terrifying, especially at times like this.
We can hope not to become so desensitized to the word “terrorism,” as we have with “mass shooting” or “sexual assault.” It’s not even that we use the word too liberally —perhaps we’re simply too desensitized by the scale of violence we are facing.
Our immediate reaction to all of this may be to say, “It won’t ever happen to me.” But this has happened to us. We saw our loved ones, friends and fellow Bostonians maimed in the name of terrorism just two years ago at the Boston Marathon bombings. And now we’ve seen terrorism strike again across the nation — but the fact is, the attacks are here. They are on us. We are Americans, and we are being fiercely targeted, no matter our geographic location.
