We continue to dance around the obvious problem

The push notification came across my phone promptly at 11 a.m., Dec. 2 with news of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif.

Calls placed to local 911 operators from the Inland Regional Center told authorities shots had been fired at a Christmas party for workers of the county’s health department.

By 11:04, San Bernardino police were beginning to arrive to survey the carnage — and the story — that was about to unfold, tweeting of a “20 victim shooting incident.”

Two hours later, while numbers are not specific, police do confirm multiple casualties and within three hours after the first reports, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan announces 14 fatalities and 14 injured in the attack. Ultimately the injured count would rise to 21.

But it did not take long for the gun control politicking to begin.

And there’s no one better than President Barack Obama at speaking before all the facts are collected. He’s proven that on too many occasions to count.

“Obviously our hearts go out to the victims and the families,” he told CBS. “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world. And there are some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds.”

But the President was hardly alone with — pardon the very badly timed pun — shoot first, think later rhetoric.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), immediately blamed the Second Amendment and suggested implementing the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Step Program to combat gun violence.

A former FBI official jumped on the militia bandwagon, pegging the event to domestic terror. And because a Planned Parenthood office was “just blocks away,” that, too, could have been a motive, said one talking head on a news broadcast.

At 3:20 p.m., law enforcement received a tip that a black SUV seen leaving the scene was spotted at a nearby home. What ensued was a high-speed chase with guns a blazing. Soon two suspects, who will later be identified as Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were both dead.

But the story was really just beginning to unfold.

Suddenly when it was revealed that the home of Farook and Malik was a virtual arsenal with several thousand rounds of ammunition, a store of pipe bombs and materials to build improvised explosive devices — IEDs — those so quick to cast blame on whackos on the right fell silent when it came to fingering possible Islamic extremists.

Hour-by-hour as the investigation continued, it became more and more evident that this was not a case of “workplace violence” as some desperately wanted to cling to.

Still days later no one in the president’s administration could spit it out — that this mass murder — the worst linked to terrorism in the United State since 9-11, was tied to violent, yet small elements of the Muslim faith.

By 6:45 p.m. the identity of the male suspect had been made public and thus began the unraveling of a huge spool of connections by Farook and Malik to all things terrorism. The discovery of the trove of killing devices found in their home ought to have pointed the finger where it belongs.

But no, Attorney General Loretta Lynch later doubled-down and warned of added criminal penalties for anyone found guilty of committing hate crimes towards Muslims. She neglected to study FBI statistics that show those who most often report being victims of such crimes — to the tune of nearly 60 percent — are Jews. The group whom Lynch was most concerned is victimized at 11 percent.

Last Sunday President Obama went before the nation in an Oval Office address where, for the better part of a quarter-hour, he found every possible way to still dance his way around the plain fact that we are in a war with people — again albeit an infinitesimally small sliver of Islam — who want to see us in the West dead.

For those who continually look the other way, and no matter what, cannot cough up the words “radical Islamic terrorism” when the need is there, just what will it take?

I shudder to think.

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].