San Bernardino shooting: news and updates

50 people were killed at a shooting at the Pulse gay bar in Orlando, Florida. It’s a shocking number — the largest mass shooting in American history. It’s also part of a rolling national tragedy: roughly 33,000 Americans every year are killed with firearms (homicides, suicides, and accidents).

In the abstract, it’s hard to appreciate just how catastrophic this death toll is. So we made a chart to make things more concrete. It compares the number of Americans killed by guns between 2001 and 2013 to the number of Americans killed by war, AIDS, illegal drug overdoses, and terrorism combined during the same time period. It turns out that guns killed more Americans than all of those horrors put together:

The FBI captured the iPhone of dead San Bernardino terrorism suspect Syed Rizwan Farook back in December, but encryption technology prevents them from accessing its contents. On Tuesday, a federal magistrate judge in California ordered Apple to write a custom version of the iPhone software that disables key security features and install it on Farook’s iPhone in order to foil the encryption.

On Wednesday morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook came out swinging in response. In his open letter to customers, Cook described the FBI’s actions as an “unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers.”

The federal government is willfully ignorant about guns.

When you don’t know enough about something, your reaction is probably to research it — on Google, on Wikipedia, at the library. The federal government is supposed to respond in a similar way when it has questions about certain laws and policies. So if there’s a public health crisis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is usually charged with looking into the matter by funding studies and research that look into the best policies to deal with the issue.

The FBI now believes the couple suspected of killing at least 14 people and wounding at least 21 more in San Bernardino, California, on December 2 were radicalized two years ago, the agency said on Wednesday.

Officials identified two suspects as Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, who were married. Farook was reportedly an employee of the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, which rented a conference room at the social services center in which the shooting took place on December 2. Both suspects died in a shootout with police after the attack.

Since the San Bernardino shootings, it’s become increasingly clear that the shooters — Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik — had been radicalized by jihadist propaganda, and Malik reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook. So far it’s unclear if they had direction from ISIS proper; it appears more likely that they decided to attack on their own after being exposed to ISIS’s message. “We have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas,” President Obama said in a Sunday address, “but it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization.”

If it does turn out that the San Bernardino shooters were in fact “lone wolves” with no direct connection to the ISIS leadership, this raises an obvious question: How worried should Americans be about this kind of “lone wolf” attack happening again?

When President Obama announced that he’d deliver his third-ever primetime Oval Office address on Sunday night, political insiders feverishly speculated about what he might say. Would he announce some shocking intelligence findings on the San Bernardino attack? Would he roll out sweeping new policy proposals for the fight against ISIS? Would he issue a rousing call for new gun control measures?

But he didn’t do any of that.

Tonight at 8 pm Eastern, President Obama gave a brief televised speech to the nation about the San Bernardino shooting and the threat from ISIS. The address was fairly short, explaining the steps the US is still taking to fight ISIS (particularly air strikes), and calling for new gun control measures. He also cautioned against rhetoric that would turn Americans against each other, particularly the kind of Islamophobia that has come from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the weeks following the Paris attacks.

Sunday night, President Obama gave a primetime address to the nation on the San Bernardino attacks and ISIS (or, as he calls it, ISIL). In it, Obama gave a full-throated defense of his counterterrorism policy, and called on Congress to take additional steps to help limit the terrorist threat to the United States — such as preventing people on the no-fly list from purchasing guns. Here’s a (preliminary) transcript of his remarks.

Good evening. On Wednesday, 14 Americans were killed as they came together to celebrate the holidays. They were taken from family and friends who loved them deeply. They were white and black, Latino and Asian, immigrants, moms and dads.

On Thursday, Mark Follman claimed in the New York Times that Vox, other news outlets, and the Mass Shooting Tracker are wrong, and there haven’t been 353 mass shootings in 2015. Instead, Follman wrote that there have only been four mass shootings this year, based on a database he helped build at Mother Jones.

How could two organizations come to such tremendously different numbers for mass shootings? As Vox’s Dylan Matthews explained, it all depends on which definition you use. Follman prefers a very narrow definition, in which an event only counts as a mass shooting if you only include shootings in which four or more people are killed and exclude domestic, gang, and drug violence. Some criminologists, such as Northeastern University professor James Alan Fox, prefer to include any shooting in which four more people are killed.

This week, two shooters opened fire on a workplace holiday party in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and wounding at least 21. Not much is known about the shooters yet, other than the fact that all four of their weapons were legally purchased, according to the New York Times.

What we do know is that the events in San Bernardino are far from unique: Statistics show that there’s a mass shooting, defined as one in in which at least four people shot, almost every day in America. To most people watching, this frequency suggests that, with Congress gridlocked, mass shootings have become the new normal. In a succinct encapsulation of the public’s disillusionment, the writer Dan Hodges tweeted in January, “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

Any good political fight needs a bad guy, and for liberals upset about congressional resistance to gun control legislation, the National Rifle Association is the bad guy of choice. And it’s not a bad choice by any means. The NRA really does carry enormous clout on Capitol Hill.

But liberals — like Igor Volsky from ThinkProgress in this video — often like to express this clout in terms of the NRA’s campaign contributions.

Real-time coverage of mass shootings is notoriously bad. But last night’s coverage of the San Bernardino mass shooting went beyond bad: It veered into borderline Islamophobia.

As a search for the suspects dragged on for hours, speculation about the perpetrators’ identities swirled on social media. Erroneous reports from major news outlets only added to the chaos and confusion.

The Second Amendment is more than 220 years old. When it was written, the world did not have machine guns, assault rifles, or tanks, instead relying on clunky muskets that were a pain to reload.

Yet as a video from States United to Prevent Gun Violence points out, America’s lax gun laws are often based on a reading of the Second Amendment that makes it hard to pass restrictive gun laws, even as our weapons get much, much deadlier.

On Wednesday, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, killed at least 14 people and wounded at least 18 more in a mass shooting and subsequent shootout with police in San Bernardino, California. But as appalling the massacre was, mass shootings aren’t uncommon in the United States: In the past 1,066 days, there have been at least 1,044 mass shootings, with shooters killing at least 1,327 people and wounding 3,784 more.

The counts come from the Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowdsourced database that tracks shootings since 2013 in which four or more people were shot. As with any crowdsourced database, it’s likely missing some shootings, and some of the shootings are missing details.

In a brief Oval Office statement on the San Bernardino shooting Thursday morning, President Barack Obama said the suspected killers’ motives were still unknown — but that all Americans, including “our legislators,” had “a part to play” in reducing violence like this.

“We see the prevalence of these kinds of mass shootings in this country,” the president said. “And I think so many Americans sometimes feel as if there’s nothing we can do about it.” But, he argued, “we can’t just leave it to our professionals to deal with the problem of these kinds of horrible killings. We all have a part to play.”

“This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America,” President Obama said. “We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”

The occasion for Obama’s speech was a mass shooting. But which mass shooting? The shooting on June 18, 2015, that killed nine in Charleston, South Carolina? The shooting on May 23, 2014, that killed six in Isla Vista, California? The shooting on July 20, 2012, that left 12 dead in Aurora, Colorado? Was it Wednesday’s shooting in San Bernardino, California?

The New York Daily News’s Thursday cover story on the shooting in San Bernardino takes a strong stand on a surprising controversy that emerged in the wake of the shooting — politicians’ habit of offering banal “thoughts and prayers” to the victims while opposing any kind of policy response.

Republicans are, of course, not the only ones to offer thoughts and prayers in the wake of a tragedy. Hillary Clinton, for example, tweeted along these lines after the church shooting in Charleston.

BBC World News is clearly fed up with gun violence in America. Here’s how it started a report on the shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed upward of 14 people on Wednesday:

If this sounds like the way the US would cover some war-torn, faraway country few Americans could find on a map, you’re right — and that’s probably deliberate. The BBC World News team has apparently read that Onion article about as many times as many Americans have.