Crack down on handguns

Gunners762 · October 25, 2007 13:49

Yes Folks another fine gun story and with elections coming get used to seeing some of the worst anti-gun dribal hit print... www.nydailynews.com When we conjure up images of the terrorist threat to America, it usually involves chemical, biological or, God forbid, nuclear weapons. But it turns out one of the biggest terrorist threats to ordinary New Yorkers is also one of the most familiar - and most ignored: ordinary handguns.

Yet America's strategy for keeping firearms out of the hands of terrorists is lax beyond belief. It's so lax, in fact, that today, people on the federal terrorist watch list are not prohibited from purchasing guns. Just think - a person on the watch list can be barred from getting on a plane, but he or she cannot be prevented from buying some weapons.

For that matter, unlicensed dealers are, under some circumstances, permitted to sell guns without a background check. Want to buy a gun without drawing attention? Just go to a gun show.

And at a time when Osama Bin Laden and his associates are encouraging "homegrowns" to rise up and heed the call of jihad, this kind of willful blindness could be deadly.

Overseas, small arms already account for most terrorist violence. According to the National Counter-Terrorism Center, armed attacks accounted for nearly half of all terrorist fatalities worldwide last year.

And here at home, we've seen the damage ordinary weapons can do in the wrong hands. More American civilians died in the Virginia Tech gun rampage than were killed by terrorists worldwide in the entire year of 2006.

If a foreign national with serious mental health issues can readily obtain guns in the U.S., imagine how much easier it would be for a resident self-starter to get his or her hands on weapons.

Not likely, you say? A 2005 Government Accountability Office study found that in one five-month period, 35 suspected terrorists purchased guns in the U.S.

The National Rifle Association and its supporters are quick to retort that the most recent high-casualty attacks in the U.S. involved truck bombs and hijacked planes that were commandeered using sharp cutting devices, not guns.

But in the post-Sept. 11 era, given the new precautions now in place and the hyper-vigilance of law enforcement, such complex attacks are far less likely. For the savvy terrorist, ordinary guns could very easily come back in vogue.

The anti-gun control position also glosses over the use of firearms in the last 15 years by terrorists like Mir Aimal Kansi, who shot CIA employees on their way to work; Rashid Baz, who shot Yeshiva students crossing the Brooklyn Bridge; Ali Abu Kamal, who shot visitors at the Empire State Building; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who shot travelers checking-in at the El Al ticket counter at LAX Airport; and Naveed Afzal Haq, who shot six people at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.

The death toll in those cases never reached the double-digits. But as the Virginia Tech case illustrates, all one needs is an abundant amount of reload ammunition, a densely populated soft target, and the will to kill to produce dozens of deaths in just minutes.

We've got to put the safety on gun sales to potential terrorists - now. A bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) would start giving the federal government the tools to deny the sale of guns to anyone associated with terrorism.

Unfortunately, it's sitting idly in committee.

And that's only one sign of how out of touch the federal government is on the issue. The White House has recently updated its National Strategy for Homeland Security - and conspicuously absent from the report is any serious discussion of gun control as a means of preventing terrorism.

If our leaders don't act soon, terrorists will capitalize on the opportunity our current gun laws provide. And when that happens, the one thing we have strived so hard to prevent will recur: terror will again strike the American homeland.

Klarevas is a professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs, where he teaches the graduate seminar on transnational terrorism.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/...a_tool_of.html

Crack down on handguns

Comments

Recent Activity