[There was a video here]

Speaking from the Oval Office on Sunday, President Barack Obama addressed the ambient cloud of fear and paranoia that has descended over the nation of late. This weekend, his administration designated the San Bernardino mass shooting “an act of terrorism” inspired (but not directed) by ISIS.

“The terrorist threat has evolved into a new phase,” Obama said. “I know that after so much war, many Americans are asking whether we are confronted by a cancer that has no immediate cure...The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it.”

The president did not announce anything new, but re-emphasized his administration’s commitment to present strategies: a combination of air strikes, special forces operations, financial sanctions, and support for local allies.

“We should not be drawn once again into a long and costly ground war” in Iraq or Syria. “We cannot turn against one another,” Obama insisted, saying that we cannot allow this conflict to be defined as one between the United States and Islam. “ISIS does not speak for Islam...they are thugs.”

However, even as we reject proposals for religious tests and discrimination against Muslims both in the United States and around the world, Obama said, Muslims must assess why this ideology has spread through their communities.

(The president almost never speaks from the Oval Office, the New York Times points out. He’s only done it twice: “In the summer of 2010, as oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from a broken well, and a few months later, as he announced the end of combat operations in Iraq, declaring that he had made good on a central promise from his campaign. He has not done it since.”)

Obama did, however, suggest that other policy efforts can be made, urging “high tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder to use technology to escape from justice.” This echoed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s remarks earlier Sunday, suggesting that Silicon Valley companies should “disrupt” ISIS.

Also, addressing the shooting in California, Obama said that Congress should pass a law mandating that “no one on a no-fly list should be able to buy a gun.”

He said the same thing in his weekly radio address on Saturday:

We know that the killers in San Bernardino used military-style assault weapons—weapons of war—to kill as many people as they could. It’s another tragic reminder that here in America it’s way too easy for dangerous people to get their hands on a gun.

For example, right now, people on the no-fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun. That is insane. If you’re too dangerous to board a plane, you’re too dangerous, by definition, to buy a gun. And so I’m calling on Congress to close this loophole, now.

Last year, The Intercept reported that, under the Obama administration, the no-fly list has grown ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000 people, and that more than 40 percent of the 680,000 people included in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.