Two years ago, an al Qaeda spokesman encouraged jihadists in the United States to take advantage of the gaping loopholes in America’s gun laws and buy weapons at gun shows where there are no background checks.
“You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check and mostly likely without having to show an identification card,” Adam Gadahn advised al Qaeda followers in a video, before ending on an ominous note. “So what are you waiting for?”
Because of this, the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School and other attacks by crazed gunmen, polls show that tightening background checks to include all commercial gun sales is very popular, as high as 90 percent among all Americans and nearly that high among Republicans, gun owners and even among “members” of the NRA, the gun lobby’s marketing and lobby group.
So why did all but four Republicans vote against a bill to strengthen background checks? The bill’s tea-party sponsor, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, told the editorial board of a Pennsylvania newspaper that his fellow Republicans voted against the bill, not on its merits, but in order to make the U.S. president appear weak and ineffectual so that he will have little influence over the outcome of the midterm congressional elections next year:
TOOMEY: In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.
Never mind the al Qaeda leader’s advice to jihadists in America to exploit the background check at gun shows. Never mind the polls that show that their constituents overwhelmingly want the checks tightened. And never mind the elementary school children who were massacred in Newtown.
Republican senators voted against this bill so that Pres. Obama would appear weak — which would prompt a right-wing reporter like ABC’s Jonathan Karl to ask the president this sort of question at a news conference:
Mr. President, you are a hundred days into your second term. On the gun bill, you put, it seems, everything into it to try to get it passed. Obviously, it didn’t. Congress has ignored your efforts to try to get them to undo these sequester cuts. There was even a bill that you threatened to veto that got 92 Democrats in the House voting yes. So my question to you is do you still have the juice to get the rest of your agenda through this Congress?
Yes, some of the Republican senators are taking a hit in the polls back home over their votes. But, so far, while the public writ large supports tightening the laws, the passion and the money are still on the gun lobby’s side. This dynamic will not change until voters across the country start making their support for tighter gun laws a bigger factor when they vote.
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