Excerpt
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss domestic terrorism in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting, the continuing political debate over gun control, as well as the shape of the GOP presidential contest.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Back in the U.S., it has been a full week of news. The San Bernardino shooting once again sparked a political debate on guns and terror, while Paul Ryan ended his first month as speaker of the House of Representatives with a major policy speech.
That brings us to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Welcome, gentlemen.
So, another week, another shooting. Now we are learning from the FBI that they are considering this a terrorist incident. They’re going to focus on it that way.
And we’re already hearing, Mark and David, comments for different kinds of solutions from different sides of the political aisle, David.
Republicans are saying too much focus on guns, the administration isn’t doing enough to fight terrorism. Do you see any kind of consensus coming together?
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times: Well, I don’t see why it’s an either/or thing. It’s additive, not alternative.
The guns, you know, I don’t see why people need to be carrying these kinds of guns, the guns that were used in this kind of attack. And so it seems to me some sensible legislation, I don’t know if it will help prevent this. As I have said all along, there are 250 million guns in this country. It’s hard to control gun usage. Nonetheless, it couldn’t hurt.
But what’s unique about this is that it was sort of ISIS-inspired, not ISIS-run, but sort of ISIS-inspired. And that leads to two conclusions. First, ISIS has charisma. If you are a certain sort of person with some sort of mentality, suddenly, you want to latch on and swear allegiance to ISIS, apparently, and then go out and kill people.
And so giving — taking away some of ISIS’ charisma by handing them some defeat on the battlefield, the way we did to al-Qaida in Iraq, seems to me an important task.
The second thing is, this is religious. We are going to have many more religious attacks than we have had in the past, because there are going to be more religious people in the world and attacks. And that doesn’t mean they are motivated by religion. They are motivated by a politicized form of religion.
It’s not a real faith, but it’s a politicized form. You say, you go to my group, and then there are all those evil people in another group. And I’m going to go shoot up some of those evil people in the other group.
And so to me, when you have that kind of religious, political fanaticism, it’s going to take religious voices to combat it and say, we love our people in our group, but we have to treat other people outside our group with the theology of the other, with justice. And so we have to win the battle of ideas. And that has been true since 9/11 and it’s still true today.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you see a consensus coming around, either one of these ideas, Mark?
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated columnist: I don’t. I endorse David’s assessment, especially on religion.
Judy, after Newtown, the last deadliest mass killing in this country since — of the dimensions that we had in San Bernardino this week, there was a sense of personal tragedy in the United States, the loss of — the slaughter of the innocence, the murder children and educators, but there wasn’t a sense of terror, there wasn’t a sense of widespread fear.
Since Paris, I think it’s fair to say, politically, the Democrats have been tone-deaf. They have not responded, in a sense. And it’s interesting, because Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most credentialed of the national candidates in this whole area, she did respond by calling this an act of terrorism even before the FBI did.
But the response — and I agree totally on guns. It’s an outrage. It’s indefensible, the vote in the Senate yesterday, to tell how far we have come from Newtown, there was not a single vote that changed.
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