Steven Davis was in his car when he heard the news about the mass shooting in San Bernardino and the suspects on the loose in his neighbourhood. His first thought was for his wife’s safety. His second: “I wish I had a gun.”

It was, the church minister said, “an immediate response that I don’t think was my best thinking” – a reaction born out of fear, perhaps tinged by anger, when the correct path is “to respond in love”.

There was plenty of that in evidence in the vigils and fond tributes to the 14 dead and 21 injured in the wake of Wednesday’s massacre at a meeting and party for county health workers in a development centre for the disabled.

Local faith leaders urged calm, compassion and unity in the face of the horror that struck the county of two million people some 60 miles from downtown Los Angeles, where the metropolis’s eastwards suburban sprawl finally starts to melt into the desert and the mountains.

They expressed pride in what they feel is a diverse, tolerant and inclusive community, a place with a strip mall where a mosque stands next door to a cafe proudly flying the American flag that claims to offer the world’s largest pancakes.

Nationally, though, San Bernardino’s tragedy was politicised and held up as an example of difference and division. Not only through the arguments for and against gun control that follow every US mass shooting – indeed, firearms sales spiked in California after this one – but in the way that leading Republican politicians subsumed it into the febrile ongoing debate about accepting Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris attacks.

The two deceased suspects, Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook, were not Syrian. Farook was born in Illinois and Malik in Pakistan. She reportedly lived in Saudi Arabia and moved to the US on a “fiancee visa” that led to a green card.

In a primetime address to the nation on Sunday, Barack Obama said he was directing the Departments of State and Homeland Security to review the visa program under which Malik came to the US. But he issued a sharp rebuke of discrimination against Muslims, saying: “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.”



But several Republican presidential candidates feel otherwise, and have pointed to the attack in California as evidence of why the Obama administration’s plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year must be placed on hold.

Florida senator Marco Rubio said there was simply no way to vet incoming refugees and identify potential terrorists who might be in their midst.

“It doesn’t matter how long or how often you vet them,” Rubio told Fox News in an interview on Saturday. “It’s not going to be enough, because you’re not going to be able to turn up things on people that have been radicalized or never wound up on a database before. You won’t find a lot of the people who are coming here to do terrorism.”

Ben Carson said on Saturday the San Bernardino attack “should end this whole argument about Syrian refugees”.

Ted Cruz, another GOP candidate seeking the evangelical Christian vote, demanded the immigration history of the shooting suspects and their families.

Some candidates went so far as to suggest that immigration from Muslim countries be stopped altogether for the time being. Kentucky senator Rand Paul introduced an amendment last month that would put an “immediate moratorium” on US visas to visitors, students and refugees from more than 30 “high-risk” countries that he argued produced jihadists.

On Thursday, two days after the California attack, his measure got a vote in the US Senate. It failed overwhelmingly by a vote of 10-89, but that didn’t stop Paul from using the moment for presidential politics at a time when the debate has shifted toward national security.

The Kentucky senator assailed Rubio for voting against his bill in a series of tweets on Friday, in which Paul suggested his opponent preferred “open borders, broken systems” and siding with liberal Democrats.

“For years on this important national security test, I have led, and Marco Rubio has failed,” Paul said.

Rubio defended his vote in his interview with Fox, saying Paul’s amendment was “too broad” and would have ended the visa waiver program entirely – thus barring a German tourist from visiting Disney World or others from traveling to the US for the purpose of business.

“We don’t have to go that far. We just need to focus on those countries that are producing jihadists,” Rubio said. “The amendment went much broader than that, and that’s why very few people voted for it.”

A Muslim woman wearing an American flag hijab attends a gathering to mourn the San Bernardino shooting victims. Photograph: Xinhua/Barcroft Media

Rubio has instead called for restoring the National Security Agency’s surveillance capabilities in the wake of the attack and is backing legislation that would reverse reforms adopted under the USA Freedom Act earlier this year that ended the NSA’s bulk collection of phone data.

Although the jockeying among Republicans to project a hard line against terrorism is not new, it is likely to escalate with less than two months until the first caucuses are held in Iowa. Republican primary voters, in particular, have consistently ranked national security as a top priority and routinely quiz candidates at town halls on how they would handle the fight against Isis.

Meanwhile, on Friday, as reports emerged that Malik pledged allegiance to Isis on Facebook just before the shooting began, Texas admitted defeat in its legal battle to stop the federal government and an aid agency from settling Syrian refugees in the state on the basis that they could pose a security risk.

While Texas was the first state to sue, in the days after the 13 November attacks in the French capital, around 30 governors expressed deep misgivings about letting Syrian refugees into the US, even though the process involves multi-layered security and background checks and can take up to two years.

In this context, mourning mixed with misgivings about the possible political and social consequences of the assault. Tom Rennard, pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Redlands, close to Malik and Farook’s home, said that the congregation averaged 65, of whom “easily 12 to 15 will be Pakistani Americans”, part of what he said was a large south Asian community in the area, many of them working in medicine.

Local Islamic leaders expressed optimism that Muslims would not be shunned or targeted in hate crimes. But amid the heightened political rhetoric, Rennard said he is worried about a backlash prompting a generalised immigration crackdown based, like Davis’s instinctive reaction to hearing the news, on fear.

“Because of some of the response to the Syrian passport found near some of the killers in Paris it’s only natural that people might do some of the transference on to Pakistani Americans. Two of our members are awaiting their asylum hearings with immigration and customs enforcement and there is a year or two backlog but that might be slowed down for security checks,” he said.

“One of our members just went back to Pakistan and [met his fiancee] and she’s supposed to be married in this sanctuary on 27 December and we don’t know whether she’ll be allowed in the country. She is a Christian but our government might consider all Pakistanis a threat to our national security or safety of our communities.”