President Obama says that stopping the next terrorist attack in the United States will be just about as hard as stopping the next mass shooting.
“It’s not that different from us trying to detect the next mass shooter,” he said. “You don’t always see it. They are not always communicating publicly, and if you’re not catching what they say publicly, then it becomes a challenge.
Obama was asked how he could reassure Americans that they were safe when it was obvious that the federal government was unable to stop the attacks in San Bernardino.
Obama said law enforcement and national security officials would continue cooperation and maintain vigilance on issues of terrorism, but that the threat was different than the threat posed by the terrorist operatives in the 9/11 attacks.
The new threat of lone-wolf attacks, Obama insisted, was diminished by the fact that they were unable to conduct “large complex attacks” like 9/11 but admitted that “as we saw in San Bernardino, obviously, you can still do enormous damage.”
The president has approached the issue in a similar way as mass shootings, spending most of his time calling for more gun control as the answer to the terrorist attack in San Bernardino.