The NRA's Uncanny Ability To Get Conservative Politicians To Back Terrorist Groups

Gun manufacturers' lobbyists and the craven Republican politicians they own revel in telling their dopey, brain-washed supporters that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton-- or any Democrat short of Ted Strickland or John Barrow-- is going to come to their house and take away their guns. It isn't true and no one-- short of people with severe learning disabilties-- really believes it is. But it still works for Republicans in rallying their base-- despite the fact that most Americans, including Republicans-- want sane gun safety regulations. The 4 paragraphs below come from Preventive Medicine:

“Two years after the tragedy in Newtown, our study of public support for two dozen specific gun policies found a large majority of Americans continue to favor a range of gun-safety policies,” says lead study author Colleen Barry, PhD, MPP, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Support was strongest-- with little difference between gun-owners and non-owners-- for universal background checks, barring people with temporary restraining orders for domestic violence from having guns and stronger regulations of licensed gun dealers.”

Support for requiring background checks for all gun sales remained high, with 85 percent of gun owners and 83 percent of non-owners favoring the policy. In the 2013 survey, 84 percent of gun owners and 90 percent of non-owners supported background checks for all gun sales. Support for banning assault weapons among all respondents decreased from 69 percent in 2013 to 63 percent in 2015, and support for banning the sale of large capacity ammunition magazines decreased from 68 percent to 60 percent. Notably, the small erosion in support for these policies occurred almost entirely among non-gun-owners.

...In the 2015 survey, the majority of gun owners surveyed support prohibiting a person convicted of a serious crime as a juvenile from having a gun for 10 years (73 percent), prohibiting people who have been convicted of public display of gun in a threatening manner excluding self-defense from having a gun for 10 years (75 percent), and prohibiting people convicted of domestic violence from having a gun for 10 years (76 percent).

Similarly, the majority of gun owners (67 percent) also support allowing cities to sue licensed gun dealers when the gun dealer's sales practices allow criminals to obtain guns and requiring a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison for a person convicted of knowingly selling a gun to someone who cannot legally have one (71 percent).

Last week Salon ran a piece by Sophia Tesfaye about how the NRA and the corrupt politicians it owns have enabled terrorists to legally purchase guns in America. All these NRA shills may have voted last week to keep a small handful of women and children fleeing Daesh terrorists in Syria but any Daesh terrorist who got in could buy all the deadly guns he wanted because of these same hypocritical politicians. Thanks to the NRA and conservative politicians from both parties "membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law... [O]ver 2,000 individuals on the FBI’s terrorist watch list have indeed successfully and legally purchased a firearm from 2004 to 2014."

Between 2004 and 2014, suspected terrorists attempted to purchase guns from American dealers at least 2,233 times. And in 2,043 of those cases — 91 percent of the time-- they succeeded. There are about 700,000 people on the watch-list-- a point that civil libertarians have made to underscore that many on the list may be family members or acquaintances of people with potential terrorist connections.

Not a single gun buyer on the terror watch list was turned away because they posed a threat to America as a suspected terrorist. Instead, reasons for their rejections included “felony conviction, under indictment, adjudicated mental health, misdemeanor crime of domestic violence conviction, fugitive from justice and controlled substance abuse,” according to the GAO. In fact, in 2013 and 2014, the number of successful gun buyers  from the terror watch list rose to 94 percent-- with 455 suspects purchasing firearms and just 30 being denied.

Of course, the NRA has forcefully opposed any legislation to close this loophole since 2007, citing “a concern that the FBI might watchlist a person as a ‘suspected terrorist’ on dubious grounds.” Granted, 700,000 does appear to be a rather inflated amount of suspected terrorists living among us, but as the Post notes, even a full 71 percent of NRA members support prohibiting people on the terror watchlist from buying guns.

The federal government currently has no authority to block firearm sales to international or domestic terror suspects but according to the gun control group Everytown USA, nearly all terrorism-related incidents in the U.S. have involved guns.

...In 2011, American-born senior al Qaeda operative, Adam Gadahn, released a video message rallying Muslims in the West to fight with everything at their disposal.



“And in the West you’ve got a lot at your disposal. Let’s take a look at America for example,” Gadahn said. “America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle without a background check and, most likely, without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?”

Senate Democrats are trying to pass a bill to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists but the same Republicans who are screaming about the dangers of 5 year old Syrian refugees being a safety threat have been ordered by the NRA to oppose the legislation. Not a single Republican has signed up as a cosponsor to Dianne Feinstein's S.551-- Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015. Even in the House, where Republican Peter King introduced a companion bill, H.R.1076, all 23 co-sponsors are Democrats, while Boehner and McCarthy ordered it buried in the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, where two NRA crackpots, Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner and Vice-chairman Louie Gohmert make all the decisions.

The NRA and GOP will guarantee the right to buy military-grade heavy weapons that could wipe out a shopping mall to terrorists who have been banned from flying! But no Syrian children allowed because... terrorism. There hasn't been a vote on gun legislation on the floor of the House since 2011 when the NRA decided their political servants had to pass a law to hamper the feds from investigating gun crimes committed with semi-automatic weapons. It passed 277-149, all but 2 Republicans voting for it, as well as 41 mostly conservative Democrats. Most of those Democrats were subsequently defeated for reelection. But I'd like to point out that of the few left in Congress, these are the NRA gun-worshippers who also voted against Syrian refugees:

• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Gene Green (TX)
• Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Jared Polis (New Dem-CO)
• Tim Ryan (OH)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Tim Walz (MN)

These dozen House Members are where the NRA and other pro-gun groups invested their biggest wads last year. Now that John Boehner has retired and the NRA has put gun-worshipping fanatics Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Cory Gardner (R-CO) into the U.S. Senate, just look who the House gun nut poster child  is going forward: