http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/17/1451153/-A-couple-of-thousand-suspected-terrorists-on-the-FBI-watch-list-had-no-trouble-buying-firearms?detail=email
"Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law," the Government Accountability Office concluded in 2010. The law prohibits felons, fugitives, drug addicts and domestic abusers from purchasing a firearm in the United States. But people on the FBI's consolidated terrorist watchlist — typically placed there when there is "reasonable suspicion" that they are a known or suspected terrorist — can freely purchase handguns or assault-style rifles.
And, as the GAO found, a number of them do: Between 2004 and 2014, suspected terrorists attempted to purchase guns from American dealers at least 2,233 times. And in 2,043 of those cases — 91 percent of the time — they succeeded. There are about 700,000 people on the watch-list — a point that civil libertarians have made to underscore that many on the list may be family members or acquaintances of people with potential terrorist connections.
Now there are a lot of problems with the terrorist watchlist. As Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux have noted, the guidelines for putting people on the list don’t require any evidence they are actually linked to a terrorist organization. That means a lot of people on the list shouldn’t be, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them:
“Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future,” says Hina Shamsi, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.” Shamsi, who reviewed the [guidelines] document, added, “These criteria should never have been kept secret.”
So, clearly, the watchlist itself needs improvement and that ought to come first. But nonetheless, there surely are many thousands of people who are legitimately on the list. And those who are should surely be barred from legally obtaining firearms.
But as usual, the National Rifle Association has stood in the way of legislation that is designed to prohibit terrorists from purchasing firearms legally, and that obstructionism goes back to 2007.
Naturally, one the NRA’s arguments is that terrorists will just acquire firearms illegally, so such a law would only hurt “law-abiding citizens.” The gun lobby also trots out its standard rap about this kind of legislation being “sponsored by gun-control extremists."
This year, as Ingraham points out, there is a new piece of legislation—the Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015—sponsored by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Rep. Peter T. King of New York. The bill has 17 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats.
Previous versions had several Republican co-sponsors. Since February, the latest bill—H.R. 1076—has been sitting in the House Committee on the Judiciary: Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations. There is very good chance it will meet the same fate as its predecessors and never get off the committee’s shelf.
NRA and the republican congress prevent a vote on control as long as they have the keys they will never allow meaningful regulation even though the NRA is losing it's to be feared rating by politicians and it's membership those hold outs who still are afraid to anger the NRA they will go the way of the cold dead hands it's our ball whose court we place it in determines bills like theses passing. too many of those "enthusiast" are more selfish then caring in some cases even for their own dead children and those next in line for that proverbial safety accident.
so far all these gun people have done is murder other Americans, carelessly caused the deaths of their own children, parade around stores and public places just to frighten other Americans also parading around Ferguson and places like that under the pretext of assisting the law really law enforcement needs self from assigned militias and KKK AND Promise Keepers all strapped for bear oh and cowardly snipers confront federal agents ion behave of a law breaking land mooching on your tax dollar dead beat. oh yeah and blame you for not having guns to protect school kids
