Obama: U.S. Gun Law 'Has Made...Homegrown Extremists' Strategy More Attractive to Them'
By Susan Jones | August 5, 2016 | 5:05 AM EDT
President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference after attending a National Security Council Meeting on efforts to counter the Islamic State, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016, at the Pentagon in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
(CNSNews.com) - "In terms of the threat that ISIL poses to the homeland, I think it is serious," President Obama told a news conference on Thursday. "We take it seriously."
The president pointed to a New York Times report on ISIS' radicalization efforts to suggest that U.S. gun laws may encourage lone-wolf attacks here.
"[S]ome of you may have read the article in The New York Times today -- I guess it came out last night online -- about this individual in Germany who had confessed, and had given himself up, and then explained his knowledge of how ISIL's networks worked," Obama said.
"There was a paragraph in there that some may have caught, which we don't know for a fact that this is true -- but according to this reporting, the individual indicated that ISIL recognizes that it is harder to get its operatives into the United States.
"But the fact that we have what he referred to as 'open gun laws' meant that anybody, as long as they didn't have a criminal record that could bar them from purchase, could go in and buy weapons. That has made the sort of homegrown extremists' strategy more attractive to them. And those are the hardest to stop because by definition, if somebody doesn't have a record, if it's not triggering something, it means that anticipating their actions becomes that much more difficult.
"That's why the military strategy we have in Syria and Iraq is necessary, but it is not sufficient. We have to a better job of disrupting networks, and those networks are more active in Europe than they are here, but we don't know what we don't know. And it's conceivable there are some networks here that could be activated."
Obama said the U.S. has to do a better job of disrupting the messages that are reaching "a troubled individual" over the Internet.
The August 3 New York Times report mentioned by Obama is titled, "How a Secretive Branch of ISIS Built a Global Network of Killers."
Based on interviews with Harry Sarfo, a would-be foreign fighter now imprisoned in Germany, it explains how members of the Islamic State’s secret service, a group called Emni, no longer want Europeans to come to Syria. Instead, they are encouraging European radicals to stay home, "to help ccarry out the group's plaln of waging terrorism across the globe."
The portion of the article mentioned by Obama reads as follows:
The intelligence documents and Mr. Sarfo agree that the Islamic State has made the most of its recruits’ nationalities by sending them back to plot attacks at home. Yet one important region where the Emni is not thought to have succeeded in sending trained attackers is North America, Mr. Sarfo said, recalling what the members of the branch told him.
Though dozens of Americans have become members of the Islamic State, and some have been recruited into the external operations wing, “they know it’s hard for them to get Americans into America” once they have traveled to Syria, he said.
“For America and Canada, it’s much easier for them to get them over the social network, because they say the Americans are dumb — they have open gun policies,” he said. “They say we can radicalize them easily, and if they have no prior record, they can buy guns, so we don’t need to have no contact man who has to provide guns for them.”