Six Things Obama Should Say Tonight, But Won’t

Tonight, President Barack Obama will speak to the nation for the first time since the worst terrorist attack on American soil since September 11, 2001.

And he’ll talk about gun control.

CBS News announced on Sunday morning that they would stream Obama’s “urgent address to the nation on gun control at 8 PM ET.” So Obama won’t be talking about the nature of radical Islam; he won’t be talking about law enforcement failures, or how to keep us safe. No, he’ll tell us about how disarming ourselves will somehow keep us safer from terrorists the government allows into the country, fails to police, and can’t respond to quickly enough.

Great.

Here’s what Obama should say. He won’t, of course.

I’m Sorry. President Obama has spent his entire presidency downplaying the threat of radical Islamic terrorism for his own political gain. Last week, Obama’s former head of intelligence admitted on national television that Obama ignored intelligence about the rise of ISIS in order to win re-election in 2012. On the day before ISIS attacked Paris, killing 130 people, Obama said, “We have contained them.” On the day of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Obama said, “The American people should feel confident that, you know, we are going to be able to defend ourselves and make sure that, you know, we have a good holiday and go about our lives.” He said that at the same exact time that Tashfeen Malik pledged allegiance to ISIS. Obama should be apologizing to all of us for his failures to take seriously Islamic terrorism so that he can focus on his domestic agenda.

If You See Something, Say Something. We now know that a neighbor of Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik saw suspicious activity. He didn’t call the police for fear of being castigated for racial profiling. President Obama should be telling us all to be on the lookout for suspicious activity. Instead, he has sent out his Attorney General to warn us all about speaking negatively about Islam, and to investigate the Irving Police Department for properly responding to reports of a Muslim teenager, Clock Boy Ahmed Mohammed, carrying a bomb-like object into a school.

Let’s Take It Easy On The Immigration. Tashfeen Malik got into the country on a K-1 visa. She had to pass a background check in order to do so. On her papers, she wrote an address in Pakistan that didn’t exist. Obviously, nothing happened. President Obama keeps telling us that we must take in tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees it will be impossible to vet. That has to stop.

We Must Rebuild Our Military. Obviously we don’t have the resources to fight ISIS properly. If we did, we would be doing it – unless this is a failure of will rather than material. Either way, it’s Obama’s fault. He should be calling on us all to prepare for a long slog against a determined worldwide foe. Instead, he’s going to tell us to disarm ourselves.

You Are The First Line of Defense. None of the people shot in San Bernardino were armed. It’s certainly possible that one person with a gun wouldn’t have been able to stop two heavily-armed, determined terrorists. It’s also true that those terrorists would have gotten illegal weapons regardless of the law, considering they had 15 pipe bombs. A roomful of well-armed Americans would certainly have posed more of a threat to the terrorists than a room full of unarmed people. But that doesn’t match the Obama agenda.

Free Speech Is Our Core Value, and Cannot Be Sacrificed. Today, The New York Daily News ran an editorial from Linda Stasi comparing the San Bernardino terrorist murderers to one of their victims, Nicholas Thalasinos. She called both Syed Farook and Thalasinos “hate-filled, bigoted municipal employees” and refused to label Thalasinos an innocent in her death count. What did Thalasinos do wrong? According to Statsi, he “spent his free time writing frightening, NRA-loving, hate-filled screeds on Facebook about the other’s religion.” What was so hate-filled? He said he’d like to see Ann Coulter as head of the Department of Homeland Security, blasted the Muslim Million Man march, and suggested that Hashem (Hebrew for God) should blow up Iran (a country that has pledged genocide against the Jews). Yes, clearly that’s equivalent to murdering 14 people. Obama should decry this sort of insanity – words are not murder. But he won’t. After all, he’s said that a YouTube video caused the murder of four Americans in Benghazi.

If Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik could have assured the disarming of more American civilians and the utilization of the government as a tool for the quashing of anti-Islamic speech, they’d have been overjoyed. Thankfully for them, they have a President who wants to do just that.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.