America used to care about national security…its own
Are America’s guns a threat to America’s national security?
Yes, says Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center.
Ms McCord, a former acting assistant attorney general for national security, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on the easy access to at the easy access to firearms in the United States, especially semiautomatic weapons, and how they pose a national security threat, from terrorists both foreign and domestic.
She wrote: “Foreign terrorist organizations have long urged their followers to take advantage of lax U.S. gun laws to plan attacks in the United States.”
Go down to a gun show at a local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle without a background check — American Al Qaeda recruit in 2011 video
Weigh that up against the appalling news that Republican senators blocked a bill related to domestic-terrorism prevention on May 26, just days after America’s second-deadliest elementary-school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Democrats had hoped it would be a starting point for gun-control reform, but the Senate block means Congress is unlikely to pass stricter gun laws.
Let’s return to Ms McCord’s piece to understand what that means:
“In 2017 an Islamic State propaganda video featured a reportedly American fighter, wearing fatigues and a holstered pistol, urging sympathizers in the United States to ‘take advantage of the fact that you can easily obtain a rifle or a pistol in America’ and ‘spray’ the infidels ‘with bullets’. A prominent American recruit in Al Qaeda urged potential recruits in a 2011 video to ‘go down to a gun show at a 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?’ The people who killed 14 in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015 and 49 in Orlando, Fla., in 2016 — and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State — committed their carnage using semiautomatic firearms.”
And she added that military-style weapons are driving domestic terrorism. Ms McCord wrote: “Military-style weapons and gear are also the calling cards of extremist private militias in the United States, whose anti-government ideology and insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment have driven a rise in intimidation and coercion.”
We have been warned.
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Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com on May 26, 2022.
