Post’s Ingraham Suggests Gun Owners Should Be Treated Like Terrorists
The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham is once again fulfilling his role as the foundering newspaper’s go-to anti-gun propagandist, with yet another intentionally-dishonest hit piece that seeks to take advantage of fears from the terrorist attacks in France this past Friday to attack the National Rifle Association.
No, I’m not kidding.
Given France’s strict gun laws, the terrorists who attacked Paris last Friday may have turned to black market sources for the weapons they used. But in the United States, known and suspected terrorists are allowed to purchase firearms under federal law.
“Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law,” the Government Accountability Office concluded in 2010. The law prohibits felons, fugitives, drug addicts and domestic abusers from purchasing a firearm in the U.S. But people on the FBI’s consolidated terrorist watch-list — typically placed there when there is “reasonable suspicion” that they are a known or suspected terrorist — can freely purchase handguns or assault-style rifles.
…Lawmakers have tried to stop this from happening. Bills have been introduced in Congress to do just that, going as far back as 2007 at the behest of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Senator Dianne Feinstein and Republican Representative Peter King introduced a bill to do this earlier this year. The “Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015” would prevent several hundred gun purchases by suspected terrorists each year, and it includes provisions to let people challenge a denial if they believe they were placed on the watchlist in error.
But these bills have rarely made it out of committee, in part due to vehement opposition from the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress. The NRA objected to earlier versions of the bill, saying they were “aimed primarily at law-abiding American gun owners,” that “prohibiting the possession of firearms doesn’t stop criminals from illegally acquiring them,” and that the bills were “sponsored by gun control extremists.”
I hope I’m not revealing any national secrets here, but allow me to reveal the identity of one of those “dangerous terrorists” that the Washington Post would disarm without due process.This villainous “terrorist”—your’s truly—was reported to an FBI fusion center in the northeast as a possible domestic terrorist threat in January of 2013 for writing an article pointing out the fragility of our electrical grid to domestic terror attacks. In specific, I dared to note that any idiot with a .22LR can plink transformers as they did on an episode of Doomsday Preppers.
That’s it.
Ingraham and the anti-gun leftists of the Washington Post would require me to fail a NICS background check for no reason whatsoever, then attempt to figure out why, then spend of thousands of dollars to hire an attorney to prove my innocence, even though I’d done nothing remotely wrong.
American citizens and foreign nationals alike can be placed on a terrorist watch list in the United States for mundane, arbitrary, and even idiotic reasons, without even a hint of due process.
Denying good citizens their rights due to the arbitrary and inherently flawed processes used by our incompetent homeland security apparatus is bad enough, but Inghraham and his allies aren’t bright enough to catch the other major flaw in his idea; preventing actual terrorist suspects on the watch lists from buying guns would tip them to the fact that they are being watched, and would encourage them to alter their behavior. Instead of being able to roll up entire terror cells, these morons would create a situation where at the first hint of being “made,” the terror cells would splinter, and perhaps carry out immediate attacks on secondary targets.
Like with their opposition to the Tiahrt Amendment, anti-gun liberals are quite happy to make our world a much more dangerous place, as long as they can deny law-abiding citizens their natural right to be arms in the process.