After the attacks, the president and his allies tried to shoehorn the facts into a gun control narrative. In one sense this was predictable; it’s also jarring. The predictable part is that restricting access to firearms and ammunition is the public policy prescription that Obama and his party have embraced. Whatever your views on the Second Amendment, this approach was logical after Sandy Hook and some other mass shootings that have taken place during his White House tenure.

It made less sense after Chattanooga, where a self-radicalized jihadist immigrant with drug problems and mental health issues attacked U.S. military recruiting facilities, killing four United States Marines and a Navy sailor. At least one U.S. senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, thought the moral of the story was that bans on active duty military being armed on such bases should be repealed.

And the gun control argument seemed utterly out of place in the context of San Bernardino. A married couple devoted to ISIS, one of them a recent immigrant from Saudi Arabia, killed 14 co-workers of the husband, wounded 21 others, planted a remote-control pipe bomb designed to kill first responders, including medical personnel. They then tried to escape, apparently planning to use their arsenal—including 12 more bombs—elsewhere. If anything, these facts would make many Americans want to buy firearms, and look askance at Obama’s plan to resettle refugees from the country where ISIS began.