7) Lawmakers Vote To Let Terrorists Arm Themselves
In American politics, the gun debate is perhaps the most polarized. We’ve covered it before from each side, here and here. Yet whether you’re progun or antigun, we can probably all agree that allowing terrorists to have access to heavy weaponry is a really bad idea. Yet that’s exactly what lawmakers voted to let happen in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting. The US has an active watch list of suspected terrorists. These people are forbidden from getting on planes, and any evidence of them stockpiling fertilizer will trigger an FBI swoop.
Yet current laws mean that these people—whom the US government officially suspects of being terrorists—are allowed to buy as many guns as they want. Between 2004–2014, people on the terrorism watch list legally purchased guns 2,043 times. Those who tried to do so had a 91 percent success rate.As the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the Paris attacks showed, guns are now ahead of bombs as the weapons of choice for modern terrorists. Giving them a legal means to purchase these weapons is crazy. But the NRA is currently so powerful and so militant in their beliefs that even passing legislation intended to disarm terrorists is effectively impossible. Nor can we count on lawmakers to fix this loophole. As long as they’re scared of losing office, representatives of progun states will keep voting to leave the loophole open.
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