Both Obama & Trump's Answers For San Bernardino Were Wrong

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

- Groucho Marx

The ISIS terrorist attack in San Bernardino struck a deep chord with Americans for the simple reason that the massacre took place at an office Christmas party, an event that most of us participate in one way or another. The 14 people killed that day could have been any of us.

When something like this happens we look for answers. Unfortunately, it is our tendency to look for these answers from politicians and those who aspire to be politicians. President Obama being Exhibit A and then GOP aspirant now President-Elect Donald Trump being Exhibit B.

For Obama this was yet another opportunity for him to promote "common sense gun laws" as if he had a monopoly on common sense as demonstrated by the White House's collaboration with CNN in a televised national town hall meeting on gun control. Of course, all the background checks in the world aren't going to stop a straw buyer from making the purchase as was the case in San Bernardino. Common sense gun laws also are no match for a religious ideology committed to killing innocent civilians.

Of course, Donald Trump has no problem acknowledging the problem Americans face from radical Islam. The problem is that Trump paints all Muslims in this manner. Indeed, it was San Bernardino that prompted his policy of "a complete and total shutdown" of Muslim immigration and travel to this country. Aside from the fact that such a policy renders the Kurds indistinguishable from the Quds and cannot discern between Malala and the Taliban who shot her, this too would not have prevented San Bernardino. After all, Syed Rizwan Farook was born and raised in this country. Even if Trump shut down Muslim immigration and travel to this country there is nothing to prevent a native born American citizen from converting to Islam and perpetrating such an attack.

While President Obama and President-Elect Trump drew very different conclusions from San Bernardino they do have one thing in common. They both looked for easy answers and easy answers are invariably the wrong answers.