New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) has launched a new ad blitz touting the supposedly dire threat of terrorists exploiting the mythical "gun show loophole" in order to equip themselves to slaughter the infidels (that would be us). The forcible citizen disarmament lobby has been pushing that theme aggressively all month, in response to a video starring American-born Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn urging wannabe jihadists in the U.S. to go to a gun show, "and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card." What Gadahn is urging is, of course quite impossible, as we discussed here, here, and here.
Never mind that, though, this is a favorite "gun control" lobby talking point, and MAIG is not going to let it go over a minor inconvenience like facts. From the Wall Street Journal:
The Coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, whose membership includes about 600 mayors, said the ad will run on cable news channels. The ground [sic--presumably, "group" was the intended word] would not say how much it was spending on the ads.
The commercial features al Qaeda video of American-born spokesman Adam Gadahn. He grew up in California and is believed to have traveled to Pakistan, where he became a multimedia propagandist for al Qaeda, frequently referring to himself as Azzam al-Amriki.
The commercial, if Gadahn were in any position to enforce a copyright claim, would probably cost MAIG even more, because it seems to be made up entirely of footage lifted from Gadahn's video, plus MAIG's text and voice-over. MAIG, in fact, neither removed nor corrected Gadahn's "fully automatic" mythology.
And less than a month after the release of Gadahn's video, some aspiring jihadists did try to equip themselves for a small arms massacre at a Seattle military entrance processing center. From the New York Times:
Federal law enforcement officials have arrested two men who they say planned to attack a military processing center here using machine guns and grenades.
Hey--maybe Gadahn was onto something--"fully automatic assault rifles" are machine guns, after all, and Brady Campaign board member Joan Peterson says grenades are also available at gun shows.
Unfortunately for purveyors of the "terrorists will exploit the 'gun show loophole!'" fairy tale, the two Seattle suspects weren't trying to arm themselves at a gun show. They were caught when the person whom they thought was providing the weapons turned out to be a paid informant for the FBI.
The two men were arrested after the source provided them with automatic rifles they believed the source had obtained, but that had actually been provided by federal agents. The weapons were inoperable.
That last sentence, "The weapons were inoperable," is interesting, isn't it? You mean that's how a gun sting operation is done, if the goal is to catch and prosecute suspects, rather than contribute to the deaths of many innocent people, and then blame those deaths on "lax gun laws"? At risk of being accused of pushing a "baseless conspiracy theory," I gotta wonder why another famous gun "sting operation" (so we're told) didn't try something similar.
Maybe you have to be an underpants gnome to understand.
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