Guns are blameless in our ‘terrorist-friendly’ system
Jun 15, 2016, 5:25 AM | Updated: 9:33 am
Day three since Orlando happened and we’re falling into the same debate about blaming guns.
That’s always puzzled me. How can you blame a tool for doing what it’s designed to do?
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In this case, the tool was a Sig Sauer MCX, the civilian version of a rifle developed for the special forces. A recording made during the shooting picked up 24 shots in 9 seconds because the killer pulled the trigger 24 times. You can’t blame the gun for that.
But making it way too easy for the wrong people to get a gun like that – there I think we can start blaming.
The FBI has a watch list with hundreds of thousands of names, including people who made angry statements supporting terrorists, like Omar Mateen. Some of those are scary enough to make the no-fly list.
You can’t follow every suspect, but suppose you could focus on people who buy powerful guns. The guns are blameless, but they are what allows that angry person to become a super efficient killer.
And yet the FBI is not allowed to use its computers to track gun purchases. The agency gets an alert only when someone on the no-fly list buys a gun, but even then it can’t know what kind of gun, it can’t stop the purchase, and the information has to be erased in 24 hours.
If someone is dropped from the no-fly list – as Mateen finally was – the FBI gets zero gun information. It can’t even alert the gun dealer that he may be making a risky sale.
So the guns themselves are blameless. But whoever designed our terrorist-friendly system of selling those blameless guns has a lot to answer for.
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