San Bernardino shooting updates: Marking one week since the attack

At this time one week ago, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, pushed through the doors of a holiday gathering and began shooting.

Before they fled, 14 people, most co-workers of Farook's, were dead. Twenty-one others were wounded.

The first official word of the attack came in a tweet from the San Bernardino Fire Department's official Twitter account.

Twelve minutes later, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department warned that there was an "active shooter."

Follow The Times' latest coverage of the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001, on our full coverage page.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), asked how Malik could get a visa and pass a K-1 visa test “when she was communicating about jihad online?”

“How does it sometimes get missed?” Schumer asked FBI Director James Comey. “This is going to cause great consternation to the American people, where we have two people talking about jihad for a couple of years, and most Americans have the assumption we’re on top of things like this.”

Comey said that in general, FBI agents know only about private communication “if we have some reason to believe it’s going on.” (Officials previously have said neither of the shooters was known to law enforcement.)

Then, the FBI chief said, agents would seek court permission to listen in to the communications, at least or until they “went dark” and started using encrypted devices to get around U.S. federal agents.

Read more about the fiancee visa Malik received and how those visas work here.

— Richard Serrano

FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, his wife, began scheming to carry out a terror attack before they were engaged and before she moved to the United States on a fiancee visa last year.

Comey’s announcement about the couple’s past takes the investigation in a new direction, suggesting that Farook, a U.S. citizen, purposely traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to find a partner to help him carry out the attack.

Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Malik may have given false information on her visa application.

Matt Nicholson, a 23-year-old Redlands resident, said he had thought about buying a firearm in the past. But the attack that claimed 14 lives Wednesday at a San Bernardino social services center — five miles from Gun Boss Armory — made him decide to buy a gun.

"It was a little too close to home," he said.

Nicholson was one of a number of rattled customers streaming into gun stores this week in and around San Bernardino County, a relatively conservative region where gun culture has deeper roots than in California's coastal cities. As politicians and gun-control advocates seize on the San Bernardino shooting as a reason to restrict firearm access, many of those on the front lines of the massacre are seeking to arm themselves.