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On Monday and Tuesday, we looked at two different ways the forcible citizen disarmament lobby hopes to exploit the Ft. Hood atrocity: block efforts to defend veterans' gun rights, and ban the FN Herstal Five-seveN pistol. As it turns out, the nanny-statists have thought of a third angle.
ABC News now cries, "Alleged Fort Hood Shooter Bought Gun, Despite Ongoing Terrorism Investigation." Actually, the title notwithstanding, the main thrust of the article seems not so much to be that the gun purchase should have been blocked (à la H.R. 2401, H.R. 2159, and S. 1317--as discussed here), but that the FBI branch that processed the background check should have been permitted to share the fact of the purchase with the part of the Bureau responsible for the terrorism investigation.
An FBI background check under the National Instant Background Check System was done when Hasan purchased the pistol -- but that information was never shared with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington, which was aware that Hasan had repeatedly contacted a radical imam suspected of having ties to al Qaeda.
Interestingly, the very next paragraph acknowledges that by the time of the purchase, the investigation had been discontinued.
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force ran down intelligence leads relating to Hasan late last year but closed the inquiry sometime in early 2009.
In other words, by the time of the gun purchase, Hasan was essentially no longer a suspected terrorist, as far as the FBI was concerned.
Next, a former FBI Special Agent laments the fact that the terrorism investigators were not aware of the purchase:
"The piece of information about the gun could have been critical," said former FBI Special Agent Brad Garrett. "One of the problems is that the law sometimes restricts you in what you can do."
Well--yes, Brad--sometimes the law does indeed restrict you in what you can do. That's kinda what laws do, and laws that restrict the government in what it can do are an essential part of liberty.
We then hear from rabidly anti-gun Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), one of the lead sponsors of "terror gap loophole" legislation.
Earlier this year, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J., introduced legislation which would prevent known or suspected terror suspects from purchasing firearms.
"If someone on any terrorist watch list tries to buy a weapon, law enforcement must be informed – period," Lautenberg said in a statement Wednesday when contacted by ABC News. "If some people are being blocked from flying on an airplane, then we should certainly know when they are buying an assault weapon."
The article goes on in that vein, but by now, it's pretty obvious what the bottom line is: to those lamenting that the purchase data was not shared with the terrorism investigators, a gun purchase is itself an indication of terrorist inclinations.
If the government has already conceived a suspicion of "terrorism," by virtue of such indicators as expressing opposition to more restrictive gun laws, opposition to abortion, displaying of the Gadsden flag, even following Norse mythology, then the purchase of a firearm would "seal the deal," and be seen as additional "evidence" of terrorist leanings. Remember, the FBI had already dropped the terrorism investigation into Hasan, so clearly, the idea here is that a gun purchase, by even a "suspect" who is considered pretty low on the threat list, is to be treated as a red flag.
Finally, this would be a pretty nifty way to implement an illegal federal database of gun purchases--just call everyone a "suspected terrorist," and then everyone's gun purchase data becomes open game for the feds.
The accompanying video, by the way, features not Senator Lautenberg, as the text article did, but equally anti-gun Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), who makes the same noises about the need for sharing of gun purchase data. The "best" part, though, comes at the very end, when the "news"caster breathlessly tells us that one of the indications of "deadly intent" was the fact that Hasan had a laser sight attached to his pistol, "to increase accuracy." Because, of course, only terrorists want to shoot accurately.
In response to my Monday article, Anchorage Libertarian Examiner Kevin Wilmeth left a comment warning against being too eager to leap on the "terrorist" bandwagon, in denouncing Hasan's cowardly atrocity.
It would do us well to keep our eyes on the ball and not be swept up into one of those "I became what I beheld" moments. If Hasan was taking orders from someone, then by all means let's find out who, but otherwise it is dangerous to simply pile on with the "Islamic terrorism" charge--and not JUST because we risk ceding the moral high ground.
Remember, "cui bono?" There IS an entity that would be oh so happy to get us all whipped up about...well, about anything except themselves. A nice rift between the very parties that have started to recently unite in their opposition would certainly benefit Master very, very neatly.
Resist it. We have plenty of legitimate work to do!
I didn't quite understand him at the time, but this latest development illustrates his point quite well, I think (Kevin went into more detail here).
Comments
The only administration that ever actually took guns from citizens was the Bush administration, after hurricane Katrina. You have more to fear from the Blackwater thugs that took guns in New Orleans than you do legislation in congress. Any laws that would take away citizens' right to bear arms would be political suicide and would never pass.
Greg, I certainly would be among the last to hold up either the Bush administration or Blackwater as "guardians of liberty," but efforts to chip away at the right to keep and bear arms are constant and relentless.
Please try harder to stay on the most important subject of all: ARMED soldiers at all times during war! The state of Texas had to finally go to CCW after the infamous Luby's killings. It took a long time to get that law.
Ft. Hood is in Texas! We are at war! Since when is a base totally disarmed? If the '50s were any example troops could mobilize fast. So, why not now? This put everyone in a hole.
All the other discussions would be over already if the troops had been armed. Lives would not have been lost.
Greg, we are on the very edge of that dangerous abyss today in California. They will never challenge the second amendment but they will make it impossible to get a gun thanks to fees, taxes, and prohibitive costs and excessive time in processing paperwork. The liberal politicians of california are systemically chipping away at our rights without actually taking them away. They are the termites in our house of liberty and that house is about to fall down. Government fears an armed citizenry but has no fear of unarmed slaves. During my military time a soldier's weapons were always in the arms room unless he was on duty and it was required for him to have it. Private weapons were kept in the homes but the commander has to be notified of them. No soldier took his weapon to his room or barracks. Even as a military cop I walked around the post unarmed when not on duty. The laws did not fail, maybe the people who applied them failed to do their job.
WRONG, GREG! The local police confiscated guns, leaving citizens helpless! Get your facts straight before you make a Democrat jackass of yourself!
Bill Clinton is to blame for the Ft Hood murders: it was his lunatic idea to ban guns from all Army personnel -of all the people on Earth, soldiers know how to handle guns! But that's all the intelligence Clinton had -and all those soldiers died because Ol' Unzipped Bill is a Left-Wing nut!
Mike, I agree that the disarmament of the soldiers is a disgrace, but I talked about that last week, other Gun Rights Examiners have talked about it, other gun rights advocates have talked about it, and frankly, I just don't have a lot more to add to that.
It's an important issue, but it's not the ONLY issue, and I wanted to talk about aspects of the atrocity that have gotten less attention.
Greg- "Any laws that would take away citizens' right to bear arms would be political suicide and would never pass."
Really? So explain the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the tens of thousands of "laws" that have been passed at every level of government since then.
I would like to buy a fully automatic Tommygun from a catalog and have it sent to my PO box without showing ID or paying ATF's "taxes". I'm glad to know that no "laws" have been passed to prevent that.
This was no a gun issue, but boy have the grabbers latched onto it.
For Greg. Best get your facts straight. The Bush administration never confiscated firearms from anybody in New Orleans. The order to confiscate came from Mayor Ray Nagin with support from the Louisiana State Governor(BOTH DEMOCRATS)to take all personally owned weapons out of the affected area.
You can blame this on the gun grabbers. If someone else would have had a gun, maybe lives would have been saved when they killed that terrorist. Clinton banned guns on the base.
I'm glad there are people like all of you out there that believe and know what is truly right. I just wish everyone could understand what is inevitably going to happen when all of these cray, egocentric, holier-than-thou, bubble gum, do-gooders we all refer to as politicians and the anti-gun populace that really beleives what the NWO lunatics are spouting.
So the FBI would have done what?
Tell someone in the politically-correct echelon of limp-wrested brass-weighted career Army staff pukes that Hasan had just waved one more red flag? That he’d bought GUNS?
Oh my.
If Hasan hadn’t been such a loser to begin with, he’d have contacted some jihad buds in EOD that could have slipped him a couple hundred pounds of something that’d really go BANG.
He could just have easily packed his jihadmobile with stuff at least worthy of a street-level IED--and taken out hundreds of uniformed infidels in his quest for jihad glory.
Hell, this worthless brainwashed air thief didn’t do any better than the punks at Columbine…and they didn‘t even have a cause.
Truth be known he was still being monitored. BUT, consistent with the stupidity and incompetence of pseudo-intel-types that’s now resulted in thousands of dead Americans, the weenies watching this maggot were naturally waiting for him to contact a career-making high profile target.
Oh well.
CIDG-of-One may have touched on something in his last paragraph. At Waco, the BATFE was conducting a raid to pad their stats to present to congress, who was about to act on the BATFE's budget for the next fiscal year. In order to get proper press coverage, the BATFE contacted the local media to invite them to the "secret" raid. Someone in the media alerted the Branch Davidians that BATFE was comming, and the rest, so they say, is history. Some of the good guys are watching their careers when we need them to be watching the bad guys. Obama's CIA trials are not going to help.
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