Boston
bomber suspects Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly horded a
small arsenal of guns. They were automatic weapons. They did not have to go
through a background check or have a permit. Authorities will now be forced to
spend countless hours and personnel trying to track down exactly how, when and
where they got their guns. They could
have easily have gotten them over the internet, at a gun show, or just simply
bought them from an individual seller on the street or anywhere else.
Tamerlan
Tsarnaev turned up on a government watch list a couple of years before the
bombing attack. Barring would be terrorists from getting guns in the US was supposed
to be one of the gaping loopholes that Congress would have closed if the Senate
gun control bill had passed. It would
have barred anyone flagged by authorities as a potential terrorist threat from
purchasing guns. As it now stands, even if the FBI had tagged Tsarnaev as a
threat, federal law bars it from doing anything to stop him from buying guns.
Massachusetts has tough gun laws that make it illegal to own a gun without a
permit and to possess a gun clip of more than 10 round capacity manufactured
after 1994. But Tsarnaev didn't need to worry about either of these
prohibitions. He could have easily gone to any neighboring state and bought high
ammo capacity guns and carted them back into Boston without any worry of being
discovered. This is another loophole that the Senate bill would have closed. It
too died just as quickly as the expanded background requirement checks and the
assault weapons ban.
No
wonder that a 2011 video has surfaced and played on cable networks had a known
Al Qaeda spokesperson exhorting would be terrorists to take full advantage of
the lax federal gun controls that allow just about anyone to openly get guns no
matter whether federal officials have fingered them as a domestic danger or
not. It didn't take the Al-Qaeda
mouthpiece's exhortation to fanatics to buy guns in the country for many to
exploit the weak gun laws. Many have. During a six year stretch from 2004
through 2010, according to a Government Accounting Office report, individuals on
the government's terrorist watch-list bought more than 1,300 guns. Even though federal laws specifically list
nine categories of persons considered dangerous and presumably barred from
buying guns, not one of the nine categories deal with anyone on the government's
terror watch list.
The
NRA through its awesome financial, lobbying and propaganda machine bullied,
harassed, and cajoled the Senate into submission and killed the gun control
bill with its anti-terrorist gun closing amendments. No surprise then, that the
NRA has been mum on the obvious connection between its kill any and all gun
control measures and the Boston terror attack. But the NRA made it clear in
2007 that being on the government's terrorist watch-list wasn't going to move
it to back off from its drumbeat assault on gun control measures. NRA Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre branded
the watch-list as "flawed" and "inaccurate" and took a big swipe at the
government for allegedly committing "abuses" in even compiling the list. The
NRA's boundless capacity to come up with endless rationales no matter how
ludicrous to bolster its attack position against gun controls was that the
watch-list was just another ploy by the government to clamp down on gun sales
and ownership. The NRA's answer was
simply to keep terrorists off the streets and there won't be a problem.
LaPierre didn't say how the government could accomplish that feat if its own
method of tracking those potential terrorists was judged by the NRA to be "flawed"
and presumably useless.
Despite
the NRA's tortured logic the horrific reality is that Tsarnaev's gun stash was
no aberration. Anti-terror experts have repeatedly noted that nearly all of
those individuals that have committed terrorist acts or actions have used guns
that were purchased legally in the country. This flies squarely in the face of
the popular notion that terrorists somehow are supplied by foreign sources or
that they smuggle weapons into the country from some sinister foreign group.
The
NRA, though, was hardly the only one that was unmoved enough to admit any tie
of the carnage in Boston to lax gun laws. The senators that caved to the NRA
and helped torpedo the gun control bill and the amendments that might make a
difference in keeping guns out of the hands of future terror bent individuals
were unrepentant. Not one of them has given any public hint that their vote may
have been way off base considering the ever present gun mayhem dangers, and
that Boston could and should be a spur to reconsider tougher gun curbs. Even
so, the Boston bomb attack still stands as a big slap at their and the NRA's
gun control obstinacy.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political
analyst. His new ebook is How the NRA
Terrorizes Congress--The NRA's Subversion of the Gun Control Debate ( Amazon ). He is an associate editor of New
America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban
Radio Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM
Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson