Al Qaeda has successfully recruited Americans and American born Al Qaeda members are calling on recruits who were also born in the U.S. to attack their fellow Americans with automatic weapons. The successful attacks that killed 164 residents of Mumbai and wounded 300 with AK-47s and hand grenades have become a model for future jihad. One terrorist, Adam Gadahn, released an Al Qaeda video in which he stated that automatic weapons can be easily obtained at gun shows.
This misconception- the widespread belief that gun shows offer highly restricted full auto firearms for sale (illegal for most people to even possess)- has been repeated many times in the news media. I am a member of the Washington Arms Collectors and will attest that there are no machine guns for sale at WAC gun shows. WAC regulates its gun shows much more strictly than the BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, FIREARMS & EXPLOSIVES regulates its operations.
The BATFE recently pressured private gun dealers to participate in illegal sales of thousands of pistols and other weapons to “straw purchasers”, actually FBI informants using U.S. taxpayers’ money to purchase the weapons which included semi-automatic rifles mistakenly labeled by the media as assault rifles. The justification for the FAST & FURIOUS program was that the illegal guns could be tracked in order to identify illegal arms dealers. The informants were selling the guns to the cartels in Mexico and the BATFE lost track of the guns.
The weapons were used to kill at least one U.S. border agent and an unknown number of Mexican citizens. The U.S. government admits that mistakes were made but there has been very little explanation as to how the federal government expected to track the guns in the first place. The Mexican government is outraged and so are the American people. Now the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, is being subpoenaed to testify before Congress as to what he knew and when.
Even as two Congressional committees were trying to get straight answers from the BATFE (and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice), a group of American converts to Islam were busy buying guns that had been rendered inoperable from a government informant in SeaTac, Washington- just North of Federal Way. The guns were to be used in launching an attack on the Military Entrance Processing Station in Seattle.
On June 1, 2009, another jihad attack by an American convert killed one soldier and seriously wounded another at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. Carlos aka “Muhammad” Bledsoe was never charged with any federal crimes and the case was handled in the Arkansas courts as a simple case of murder. The soldier’s death was classified as non-combat related and the fact that this attack even occurred is virtually unknown to most of us.
The Fort Hood shooter killed 13 people (12 soldiers) and wounded 29 in 2009. Recently the authorities have stopped another member of our armed forces from carrying out another such attack at Fort Hood.
Al Qaeda’s efforts to radicalize individuals right here in the U.S. without any direct communication or contact between Al Qaeda and its American disciples has now been very well documented.
Every time there is an attack, the authorities launch new probes into how someone failed to connect the dots. Such a probe is now being commenced in Norway to answer questions about what took the police so long to arrive at a youth camp where a rightwing ideologue hunted and killed school children because their parents were members of Norway’s ruling political party.
The terrorist commenced his attack on the youth camp by killing an unarmed, uniformed police officer. Anders Breivik claimed to be connected with networks of cell groups around Europe and expected to someday be elevated to heroic status in Europe.
All these misguided individuals, including possibly the United States Attorney General, share a certain stance when it comes to personal morality. Once the discussion shifts to a new order of morality based on abstract considerations- like defending a religion or an ideology- the time has come to sound a strong alarm!
Apparently quite a few agents at the BATFE were objecting vehemently to the federal government’s OPERATION FAST & FURIOUS (which spanned several agencies) but higher-ups in the federal government surrendered their sense of right and wrong to a cause that transcended personal moral considerations- a cause that very well may have involved creating statistics in order to justify banning so-called assault rifles.
Stop and think about all the unexpected places that threats can materialize. Government agencies are prone to blind spots that prevent them from identifying actual threats and responding on time. There are not enough resources in the world to identify every group that might pose a potential threat. People that maintain a true moral compass are the first and last line of defense against violence and political agendas based on expediency and misguided value systems.
The Law Office of Mark Knapp PLLC 