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"The US is The great gun bazaar "(Not Pakistan where you can buy rocket launchers)
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Heidi Yewman: The great gun bazaar 03/04/02Heidi Yewman The United States is "The Great Gun Bazaar," according to a report from The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence that details how terrorists use weak gun laws to amass firearms. And as if having weak gun laws wasn't enough, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently refused an FBI request to use the National Instant Background Check system to determine whether any of the 1,200 people detained after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had been approved to buy guns. So suspected terrorists are shackled and caged in Cuba, detained around the world and carpet bombed in Afghanistan but in the U.S. we won't even use an existing database to see if they purchased guns? "This report makes one thing crystal clear: terrorists and guns go together," said Michael Barnes, president of the Brady Center. "Firearms are part of the essential tool kit of domestic and foreign terrorists alike. Guns are used to commit terrorist acts, and terrorists to resist law enforcement efforts at apprehension and arrest use guns." And a new study from the Harvard School of Public Health in the February issue of The Journal of Trauma clearly shows that children from five years old to 14 years old are dying at a dramatically higher rate in states with high levels of gun ownership he easy availability of guns. If we can't agree that we should regulate guns closely to, say, protect our children, can we at least agree that we should strive to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists? When terrorist training manuals single out America for easy access to firearms we should know we have a serious gun problem. True homeland security means combating the threat of terrorism in all its possible forms, with all its potential weapons -- especially guns. The report notes that, found among the mounds of rubble at a training facility in Afghanistan for a radical Pakistan-based Islamic terrorist organization, was a manual entitled "How Can I Train Myself for Jihad" containing an entire section on Firearms Training. The manual singles out the U.S. for its easy availability of firearms and stipulates that al-Qaida members living in the U.S. "obtain an assault weapon legally, preferably AK-47 or variations." Of course some would advocate for even more guns, claiming that arming everyone helps keep people safe. If priests, politicians and school crossing guards are all packing heat it'll send a signal to potential troublemakers, they say. In fact there's even a book entitled "The Seven Myths of Gun Control," which suggests it's important to train our kids to fight so they can defend the U.S. when they are grown. While we're prepping those kids to protect and serve us all, and while gun advocates continue to have weapons pried from their cold, dead fingers, we'll continue to have tragedies like Joshua Haffner, a 22-year-old police officer who was gunned down in front of his pregnant wife in January by his 3-year-old son. The father of another three year old bought a gun shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. He hung it above the boy's bed; the child shot himself in the neck. He died instantly but it's comforting, I suppose, to note that the Second Amendment is still alive and well. Now the law is the law. Police officers need guns. But if the current law prohibits searching for terrorists this way it seems Congress has ample impetus to change the law. That is, after all, why they're elected. I'm not sure how much more obvious it has to be for things to change. I am sure Ashcroft would rather deal with nude statues at the DOJ st anything but this issue. It's curious that Ashcroft recused himself from the Enron investigation because he received $50,000 in campaign contributions from the firm during his 2000 Senate re-election campaign s not recusing himself from firearms policy even though he received $370,000 from the NRA and its supporters in the same election period. It certainly is inconvenient for Ashcroft that something so timely so directly contradicts something he holds so dear, but the connection between terrorism and guns is undeniable and I suspect it seems absurd to anyone even slightly removed from the emotion and passion of the gun debate in this country. (Heidi Yewman, who lives in Vancouver, Wash., is a member of the Clark County, Wash., chapter of the Million Mom March.) http://www.oregonlive.com/public_commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/exclude/10148145271694319.xml Read more of Ms. Yewman's propaganda at: seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/satsoap.shtml
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