New Yorker: Lax Gun Laws Are Becoming a National-Security Issue
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As usual, however, Trump has things backward. The issue isn’t gun-free zones; it is free-for-all gun zones, which decades of lax firearms laws have produced all over the country. In an America held hostage by the gun lobby, radicalized lone-wolf terrorists can get their hands on deadly weapons and mountains of ammunition just as easily as disturbed post-adolescents, delusional military subcontractors, virulent racists, and anybody else.
If the initial reports about Abdulazeez’s radicalization prove accurate, this will be the second attack in three months attempted by heavily armed homegrown Islamists. In Garland, Texas, in May, a sharp-shooting traffic cop killed two would-be attackers before they could reach their target, a crowd attending an event featuring cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Like Abdulazeez, Elton Simpson and Nadir Hamid Soofi were both American Muslims, and they, too, were reportedly armed with AK-47s.
According to officials, at least some of the weapons in Abdulazeez’s possession were obtained legally. We don’t know yet whether the authorities had any prior inkling of his conversion to radical Islam. In the Garland case, it turned out that Simpson had been the subject of an F.B.I. inquiry into his possible links to extremist groups. Indeed, back in 2011, according to the Times, he had been convicted of lying to federal agents about a planned visit to Somalia. But that didn’t prevent Simpson and Soofi from arming themselves for their attack. According to a law-enforcement source cited in a CNN report, they had six weapons in their car, all of which had been bought legally.
Evidently, the existing system of background checks for gun purchases failed to raise any alarms in these two instances. That was also the case with a .45-calibre handgun bought by Dylann Roof, who was arrested for the shootings in at a Charleston church last month, and it has been the case with all too many others who have carried out massacres.
Trump ignores all of this, of course, and he couldn’t even get the details straight about those “gun-free zones.” He ignored the fact that the military police who enforce the laws on military installations are routinely armed, as are other soldiers engaged in security roles, such as guard duty. Moreover, the four marines were killed not at the recruitment center, where the sign prohibiting firearms was located, but at the Naval Reserve center. It was there, too, that Abdulazeez was reportedly shot dead by police, who had pursued him from the recruitment office. Sadly, neither the military guards nor the police managed to stop Abdulazeez before he had killed four people. But to claim that these victims would be alive if they had been armed is pure speculation.
What isn’t speculation is that America has witnessed yet another gun massacre—which doesn’t, unfortunately, imply that policy changes are likely. In the past sixty years, the laxity of this country’s gun laws has survived just about everything: Presidential assassinations and attempted assassinations, drug wars, gang wars, cops getting shot, children accidentally shooting themselves or their parents, an epidemic of gun suicides, workplace massacres, mall massacres, theatre massacres, school massacres, and even church massacres. Now, we have another deadly phenomenon that highlights the dangers of ready access to firearms: the rise of domestically grown Islamist terrorists.
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/lax-gun-laws-are-becoming-a-national-security-issue
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