How The NRA Impeded The Boston Bomber Investigation

As this blog has noted, despite it's portrayal of itself as the representative of you typical everyday hunter ans sportsman, the NRA is in reality a front organization for gun manufacturers and opposes any and all restrictions on guns.   And as the recent bombings in Boston have helped to expose, even opposes including compounds in explosives which would enable law enforcement officials to trace the origins of gun powder and explosives.  While this policy did not ultimately block the identification of the bombing suspects, in other situations the lack of such tracing capabilities could be critical.  Does the NRA care about safety and identifying terrorists?  Of course not.  It's all about maximizing money for the gun cartel.   An article in National Memo looks at this dangerous policy of the NRA and its political prostitutes in Congress.  Here are excerpts:

The intense hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers illustrates another way that the National Rifle Association helps mass murderers — by delaying how quickly they can be identified.

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.

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 suspects in the Boston bombings killed by slipping poison into bottled water or canned food at a factory, or lacing spinach in a field with a deadly chemical, it would have taken only minutes to a few hours to identify exactly where that food was manufactured and how it moved through the food chain.  That would have quickly narrowed the search for 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.

Bombs have long been used in America for personal, criminal and political purposes. The frequency of bombings may surprise many people given the intense focus on the Boston bombs.  Roughly 5,000 bombings and attempted bombings are reported in the U.S. each year, according to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reports.

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

Read the whole piece, but the quoted language makes it clear that the NRA's agenda makes Americans less safe on a daily basis.  Again, the NRA's sole agenda is to maximize gun and ammunition sales for its financial backers.

Kathleen Parker: Gun Control Proposals Not Draconian

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker is apparently back on the wagon and not drinking the GOP Kool-Aid - at least that's what her new Washington Post column on gun control suggests.  We can readily expect Parker to be slammed and decried by the Christofascist/Tea Party/NRA base of the GOP as a traitor and effete liberal.   In the column Parker looks at the history of gun control and reminds us that once militant black activists supported a no limits approach to gun control - something that would horrify the angry white males who comprise the loudest opponents of rational gun control laws.  As is usually the case, objective facts and an understanding of history cut the far right's arguments off at the knee caps.  Here are highlights from Parker's column:

Unlike many who recently have joined the debate about gun rights, I have a long history with guns, which I proffer only in the interest of preempting the “elitist, liberal, swine, prostitute, blahblahblah” charge.

I grew up in a home with guns, lots of them, and was taught early how to shoot, care for firearms and treat them respectfully. My father’s rules were simple: Never point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them; if you intend to shoot, aim to kill.

By today’s standards my father would be considered a gun nut, but his sentiments were understandable in the context of his time. Like others of his generation, he had witnessed Germany’s disarming of its citizenry and the consequences thereafter. Thus, the slippery slope of which gun-rights advocates speak is not without precedent or reason.

But the history of gun-control laws is not without contradictions and ironies that belie the current insistence that guns-without-controls is the ipso facto of originalist America. In fact, the federal government of our Founders made gun ownership mandatory for white males, while denying others — slaves and later freedmen — the privilege.

Today, the most vociferous defenders of gun rights tend to be white, rural males who oppose any regulation. But theirs was once the ardently held position of radical African Americans. Notably, in the 1960s, Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey Newton toted guns wherever they went to make a point: Blacks needed guns to protect themselves in a country that wasn’t quite ready to enforce civil rights.

In one remarkable incident in May 1967, as recounted in The Atlantic by UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, 24 men and six women, all armed, ascended the California capitol steps, read a proclamation about gun rights and proceeded inside — with their guns, which was legal at the time.  Needless to say, conservatives, including then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, were suddenly very, very interested in gun control. That afternoon, Reagan told reporters there was “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

The degree of one’s allegiance to principle apparently depends mainly on who is holding the gun.

[T]he call meanwhile to ban assault weapons or limit magazines in the wake of the horrific mass murder of children and others at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut is hardly draconian. It won’t solve the problem of mentally disturbed people exacting weird justice from innocents, but it might limit the toll.

One also imagines that the old Reagan would say there’s no reason a citizen needs an assault weapon or a magazine that can destroy dozens of people in minutes. He would certainly be correct and, in a sane world, possibly even electable.

The bottom line is that we need reasonable gun control laws and automatic weapons and large ammunition clips need to be banned now.  And that's only the beginning of what needs to be done.