Exploiting Ft. Hood: Now it's the 'terror gap loophole'

November 13, 1:27 AMSt. Louis Gun Rights ExaminerKurt Hofmann

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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).