Mass Terrorist Attacks

On December second 2015 a mass shooting occurred at a Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. The attack was planned and conducted by a married couple living in the city of Redlands. The husband was an American born United States Citizen, while his wife was born in Pakistan but had legal residency in the United States. The couple attacked a San Bernardino Department of Public Health training event where the husband had worked at for over five years. Terrorist attacks cause the public to have many different responses and can cause chaos among citizens. There are many different responses the public has to attacks like this. There is of course the initial panic an attack causes. Many people aren’t sure how to process the attacks. Then …show more content…
Whether people want to make them harder to obtain via background checks or just ban them all together, this is a common response by some people. One thing to look at which applies to this case is that the couple did not purchase the primary guns they used in the attack, so even if a background check would have prevented the couple from purchasing the gun themselves they had already thought of a way around that. (Gibbons-Neff) By using his friend to purchase the weapons for them they didn’t draw any suspicion upon themselves. This caused them to be able to conduct the attack without any sort of knowledge from law enforcement. Senator Richard Burr stated that “there was nothing to indicate that law enforcement should have caught this plot” he goes on to say “Explain to me how you do that without any breadcrumbs that are obvious, or without anybody inside a mosque or inside a person’s family that tips you off” (Gibbons-Neff) Essentially this proves that background checks won’t necessarily prevent guns from getting into the attackers hands, but it can make it harder for law enforcement to investigate suspects prior to attacks. Several different responses are bound to happen following a terrorist attack. If some of these responses are not well managed it can cause a sense of chaos among citizens. This can be prevented by excellent police work, handling the situation efficiently and decisively shown in this case. If police continue to handle situations similar to this is a similar fashion it can greatly reduce the panic of the citizens. It can also cause citizens to make decision based on their panic such as wanting to ban guns every time there is a shooting. Both of these responses where seen in response to the San Bernardino