How The NRA Prevents Law Enforcement From Catching Violent Terrorists

As voting patterns started emerging among the freshman class in the new Congress, I saw a lot of new Members who tried appealing to progressives during the election, voting regularly against progressive initiatives. Although Matt Cartwright (D-PA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) have 100% ProgressivePunch crucial vote scores, many more have abysmal scores. Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-CA), for example, has a dismal 52.63% score. Although she represents a solid blue district (CA-35- Pomona, Ontario, Chino, Fontana, where Obama crushed Romney 67.4- 30.6%), her conservative record in the state legislature predicted a conservative voting record in Congress. I asked one of her exasperated colleagues about her tendency to vote with Boehner and Cantor so often. He said she's old and feeble and probably wouldn't be around long. Small consolation! Mike Bloomberg, eager to rid Congress of one of the NRA's most dedicated shills, Joe Baca, financed the independent campaign against Baca that swept McLeod into office. Baca spent $1,162,457 in his failed reelection campaign, while McLeod spent $294,428. Bloomberg's Independence USA PAC spent $3,296,583 boosting McLeod and slamming Baca-- $3,036,181 in the last week. The NRA independent expenditure on behalf of Baca was $1,370. (The NRA also contributed $2,500 directly to Baca's campaign.) Baca wound up with a mere 44% of the votes.

What was odd about it, though, was that McLeod wasn't exactly an NRA enemy. In fact, she wrecked the plans of the Democrats in the state legislature to tag every bullet fired from an assault weapon so that they would be traceable (AB 352, Microstamping of Bullets) and earned a B- from the NRA that year. Tagging bullets makes a lot of sense. But did you know that there is also a way to tag the kinds of bombs that terrorists use-- and that the NRA has prevented that as well? Take a look at the Lawrence O'Donnell explanation in the video above. David Cay Johnston explained how the NRA hampered the police investigation in Boston last week.

The inability to quickly track the gunpowders in the Boston bombs is due to government policy designed and promoted by the NRA, which has found a way to transform every massacre associated with weapons into an opportunity for the munitions companies that sustain it to sell more guns, gunpowder and bullets.

The price for such delays was put on terrible display Friday morning when the two brothers, who had been caught on video placing the bombs, killed one police officer, wounded another and carjacked a motorist, creating conditions so unsafe that the 7th largest population center in America spent Friday on lockdown.

But for the NRA-backed policy of not putting identifiers known as taggants in gunpowder, law enforcement could have quickly identified the explosives used to make the bombs, tracking them from manufacture to retail sale. That could well have saved the life of Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who was gunned down Thursday night by the fleeing bomb suspects.

...Had the Boston bombers used a plastic explosive, it would have included identifiers that would have allowed a quick trace. Those taggants exist because the NRA does not oppose them.

Why is that? Why this breach in the NRA’s Maginot Line of defense against reasonable regulation of guns and ammunition?

The answer appears to lie in who makes plastic explosives like Semtx, which was used to bring down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The world’s main supplier was not a company that finances the NRA, but Libya under Moammar Khadafy.

That this one breach in NRA policy traces directly to the economic interests of the American munitions industry provides powerful evidence of what motivates the NRA-- profits.

That the gun makers have managed to turn each massacre into a spike in sales of both expensive rapid-fire weapons and ammunition adds to the evidence that the NRA should be viewed as the mass-murder lobby.

...Hobbling law enforcement, and attacking it, has long been an NRA strategy.

After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, federal agents had a tough time tracing the fertilizer used to make the bomb that killed 168 people and injured 680 more because the NRA had fought using identifiers for explosives.

...Let’s not forget what Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, said shortly after that terrorist act in Oklahoma City. LaPierre went on the attack against law enforcement, comparing federal agents to the Nazis and calling them “jack-booted thugs.”

Former president George H.W. Bush then resigned from the NRA in protest, but LaPierre kept his job, which speaks volumes.

As for taggants, the “study” the NRA cites to show that good science found taggants would make gunpowder less reliable and would not work was in fact only a review of the literature.

Anyone who actually reads the 1980 report, “Taggants in Explosives,” will find this revealing line by the Office of Technology Assessment: “Due to severe time constraints, OTA did little original research.”

Technology has advanced since that report, which is so old that it was prepared on a typewriter.

We can get identifiers put in gunpowders because of technological advances, just as reports get prepared these days on computers.  And if “good science” says existing taggants fall short, then Congress can fund research to develop taggants that work without degrading the quality of the explosive charge in bullets.

But as the votes in the Senate killing modest gun regulation and controls on gun trafficking showed this week, what stands firmly in the way of reducing mass murders and bombings is one organization and its backers.

We can change that, once the public understands that the NRA is not so much a defender of Second Amendment rights as a lobby for enabling mass murder.

Politicians On Both Sides Of The Aisle Sell Out To Pollution Lobbyists

Yesterday we were wondering how it is possible that our political elites can evade their environmental responsibilities so blatantly even in the face of a public that is uneasy that politicians aren't doing enough to protect society from greedy, selfish polluters. I suppose politicians take the gamble that voters may grumble and tell pollsters they're unhappy but that they won't use environmental concerns to determine how they vote. For example, even if short-sighted, corrupt and irresponsible politicians don't care about sea levels rising, most Americans do... a lot. A survey released last week by Stanford University showed definitively that "an overwhelming majority of Americans is convinced that sea level rise resulting from climate change poses a significant threat to the United States and that coastal communities should invest in preparing for the risks."

According to ProgressivePunch there are over three dozen Members of Congress who have voted badly on every single environmental bill that's been proposed single they were elected-- both the really important bills and the routine bills, everything. And the 38 Members voted for every single attack on the environment that's come up. All but one of them, Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-CA), are Republicans and most of them are backbenchers, although you should recall a few names that we've come across before, like Matt Salmon (R-AZ), Steve Stockman (R-TX), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Kerry Bentovolio (R-MI), Robert Pittenger (R-NC), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), Trey Radel (R-FL), Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Ted Yoho (R-FL), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ron DeSantis (R-FL). Aside from McLeod's zero rating, the 3 other most anti-environmental Democrats in the House are a trio of exceedingly corrupt Blue Dogs who take cash from polluters to vote with Republicans: Jim Costa (CA), Collin Peterson (MN) and Henry Cuellar (TX).

Congress' most anti-environmental Dem

You would think an informed electorate would defeat these bandits at the first opportunity. But what about an uninformed electorate-- the one we have in most of these backward, rural and suburban districts? Yesterday's NY Times had a story Hong Kong-based Edward Wong that could wake them up a little-- if any of them read newspapers (other than the ones available at checkout counters about Princess Diana mating with visitors from a previously unknown moon of Jupiter. Wong warns that in 2010 alone, 1.2 million premature deaths in China were related to air pollution. Gloria Negrete McLeod represents a heavily Democratic part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area that includes Pomona, Ontario, Montclair, Chino and Fontana. Obama beat Romney in this district 67.4-30.6%. I can't imagine voters there know they elected the most anti-environment Democrat in the whole Congress. Do they have to wait for numbers like China's before they ditch this sociopath?

What the researchers called “ambient particulate matter pollution” was the fourth-leading risk factor for deaths in China in 2010, behind dietary risks, high blood pressure and smoking. Air pollution ranked seventh on the worldwide list of risk factors, contributing to 3.2 million deaths in 2010.

By comparison with China, India, which also has densely populated cities grappling with similar levels of pollution, had 620,000 premature deaths in 2010 because of outdoor air pollution, the study found. That was deemed to be the sixth most common killer in South Asia.

...Calculations of premature deaths because of outdoor air pollution are politically threatening in the eyes of some Chinese officials. According to news reports, Chinese officials cut out sections of a 2007 report called “Cost of Pollution in China” that discussed premature deaths. The report’s authors had concluded that 350,000 to 400,000 people die prematurely in China each year because of outdoor air pollution. The study was done by the World Bank in cooperation with the Chinese State Environmental Protection Administration, the precursor to the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

There have been other estimates of premature deaths because of air pollution. In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that there were 1.3 million premature deaths in cities worldwide because of outdoor air pollution.

Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, warned that “urban air pollution is set to become the top environmental cause of mortality worldwide by 2050, ahead of dirty water and lack of sanitation.” It estimated that up to 3.6 million people could end up dying prematurely from air pollution each year, mostly in China and India.

There has been growing outrage in Chinese cities over what many say are untenable levels of air pollution. Cities across the north hit record levels in January, and official Chinese newspapers ran front-page articles on the surge-- what some foreigners call the “airpocalypse”-- despite earlier limits on such discussion by propaganda officials.

In February, the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced a timeline for introducing new fuel standards, but state-owned oil and power companies are known to block or ignore environmental policies to save on costs.

...Last week, an official Chinese news report said the cost of environmental degradation in China was about $230 billion in 2010, or 3.5 percent of the gross domestic product. The estimate, said to be partial, came from a research institute under the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and was three times the amount in 2004, in local currency terms. It was unclear to what extent those numbers took into account the costs of health care and premature deaths because of pollution.

No one's going to rid us of corrupt politicians who do the bidding of polluters-- whether we're talking about Gloria Negrete McLeod and Blue Dog Jim Costa in California or corrupt right-wing ideologues like Florida freshmen Ron DeSantis, Ted Yoho and Trey Radel; we have to do it ourselves, while their respective party Establishments do all they can to protect their seats.