San Bernardino attack drawn into Republican calls to halt refugee intake

Steven Davis was in his car when he heard the news about the mass shooting in San Bernardino and the suspects on the loose in his neighbourhood. His first thought was for his wife’s safety. His second: “I wish I had a gun.”

It was, the church minister said, “an immediate response that I don’t think was my best thinking” – a reaction born out of fear, perhaps tinged by anger, when the correct path is “to respond in love”.

There was plenty of that in evidence in the vigils and fond tributes to the 14 dead and 21 injured in the wake of Wednesday’s massacre at a meeting and party for county health workers in a development centre for the disabled.

Local faith leaders urged calm, compassion and unity in the face of the horror that struck the county of two million people some 60 miles from downtown Los Angeles, where the metropolis’s eastwards suburban sprawl finally starts to melt into the desert and the mountains.

They expressed pride in what they feel is a diverse, tolerant and inclusive community, a place with a strip mall where a mosque stands next door to a cafe proudly flying the American flag that claims to offer the world’s largest pancakes.

Nationally, though, San Bernardino’s tragedy was politicised and held up as an example of difference and division. Not only through the arguments for and against gun control that follow every US mass shooting – indeed, firearms sales spiked in California after this one – but in the way that leading Republican politicians subsumed it into the febrile ongoing debate about accepting Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris attacks.

The two deceased suspects, Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook, were not Syrian. Farook was born in Illinois and Malik in Pakistan. She reportedly lived in Saudi Arabia and moved to the US on a “fiancee visa” that led to a green card.

In a primetime address to the nation on Sunday, Barack Obama said he was directing the Departments of State and Homeland Security to review the visa program under which Malik came to the US. But he issued a sharp rebuke of discrimination against Muslims, saying: “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.”