“The Mass Murder Lobby”: How The NRA Impeded The Boston Bomber Investigation
The intense hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers illustrates another way that the National Rifle Association helps mass murderers — by delaying how quickly they can be identified.
The inability to quickly track the gunpowders in the Boston bombs is due to government policy designed and promoted by the NRA, which has found a way to transform every massacre associated with weapons into an opportunity for the munitions companies that sustain it to sell more guns, gunpowder and bullets.
The price for such delays was put on terrible display Friday morning when the two brothers, who had been caught on video placing the bombs, killed one police officer, wounded another and carjacked a motorist, creating conditions so unsafe that the 7th largest population center in America spent Friday on lockdown.
But for the NRA-backed policy of not putting identifiers known as taggants in gunpowder, law enforcement could have quickly identified the explosives used to make the bombs, tracking them from manufacture to retail sale. That could well have saved the life of Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who was gunned down Thursday night by the fleeing bomb suspects.
Had the suspects in the Boston bombings killed by slipping poison into bottled water or canned food at a factory, or lacing spinach in a field with a deadly chemical, it would have taken only minutes to a few hours to identify exactly where that food was manufactured and how it moved through the food chain. That would have quickly narrowed the search for suspects.
With many food products you can use a smartphone app to scan the product’s barcode and learn where, when and by what company the product was made. Cans and bottles also come with codes printed or stamped on them to help stop foodborne illness by tracking products to their source.
“With almost any food these days you can quickly track it from the source to the store where it was sold,” according to Bill Marler, a Seattle litigator who specializes in food safety cases and sponsors the website Food Safety News.
Had the Boston bombers used a plastic explosive, it would have included identifiers that would have allowed a quick trace. Those taggants exist because the NRA does not oppose them.
Why is that? Why this breach in the NRA’s Maginot Line of defense against reasonable regulation of guns and ammunition?
The answer appears to lie in who makes plastic explosives like Semtx, which was used to bring down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The world’s main supplier was not a company that finances the NRA, but Libya under Moammar Khadafy.
That this one breach in NRA policy traces directly to the economic interests of the American munitions industry provides powerful evidence of what motivates the NRA – profits.
That the gun makers have managed to turn each massacre into a spike in sales of both expensive rapid-fire weapons and ammunition adds to the evidence that the NRA should be viewed as the mass-murder lobby.
The major source of plastic explosives may also be significant in understanding the NRA’s willingness to go along with taggants for plastic explosives, which are much more powerful than gunpowder.
But gunpowder, like guns, are extremely difficult to trace because for more than three decades the NRA has fought to make sure it’s difficult to almost impossible to do.
That difficulty results not from the technical issues at hand, though the NRA tries to make people think that’s the case by mischaracterizing a 1980 government report.
In the case of guns, the NRA claims anything remotely resembling a gun registry or a national database tracking guns from manufacturer to retail sale would help the government disarm the citizenry. In this the NRA fuels the fantasy that in the event the American government turned on the people, bands of armed patriots could defeat the military with its trained soldiers, aircraft, drones, advanced weaponry and communications.
Iraqi households almost all had guns, too, but that did not protect them from their country’s military or the invading American-led ground forces a decade ago.
Bombs have long been used in America for personal, criminal and political purposes. The frequency of bombings may surprise many people given the intense focus on the Boston bombs.
Roughly 5,000 bombings and attempted bombings are reported in the U.S. each year, according to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reports.
The ATF data, like that the FBI gathers, takes a broad measure, counting bombs made from matchsticks as well as dynamite.
The level of reported bombings in 2011 and 2012 was triple the number compared to more than four decades ago, when I wrote a three-part series in the afternoon San Jose News on homemade explosive devices. Back then, as a staff writer for the morning San Jose Mercury, I covered California radicals, left and right, and the cops trying to catch them. I even got one bomb-maker in 1972 to invite me home to see a nonworking bomb model fashioned from advice in a book we both owned, anti-war protester William Powell’s The Anarchist Cook Book.
Hobbling law enforcement, and attacking it, has long been an NRA strategy.
After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, federal agents had a tough time tracing the fertilizer used to make the bomb that killed 168 people and injured 680 more because the NRA had fought using identifiers for explosives.
As my then-colleague Fox Butterfield reported in The New York Times three weeks after the crime:
Technological advances in the last three decades might have made it harder to build such a bomb and easier to trace its origin, the experts say, but gun enthusiasts and makers of fertilizer and explosives have repeatedly blocked efforts to put the research to use.
“It is just amazing that in this dangerous time, fanatical, boneheaded people are opposed to controls on explosives,” said then-Representative Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat from Brooklyn, who introduced bills in 1993 and 1994 that would have forced manufacturers to add an identifying marker to explosives so their users could be tracked.
Mr. Schumer was referring primarily to the National Rifle Association and the explosives industry, which helped defeat the bills, citing among their objections safety hazards and reliability. The use of markers, they said, makes explosives more unstable and, when used in gunpowder, makes the charge less reliable.
Reynold Hoover, a former bomb expert with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said his agency had money in the budget in the 1970s to develop a tagging or identification agent, known as a taggant. The 3M Corporation devised the technology by the late ’70s, said Mr. Hoover, now a consultant in Washington: fluorescent particles that could be detected by ultraviolet light. Manufacturers would use a different taggant in each batch.
Although up to 90 percent of taggants might be destroyed in a detonation, enough would remain to reveal their source.
In 1979, while conducting a $5 million pilot project using taggants in some seven million pounds of explosives, the ATF was able to track down and convict James L. McFillin, who had used an explosive, Tovex 220, to make a bomb that killed one man and injured another in Baltimore.
But shortly afterward, Congress ordered the bureau to stop work on ways to trace explosives. At the time, Representative William J. Hughes, the New Jersey Democrat who headed the House subcommittee on crime, said the National Rifle Association and makers of explosives had pressured Congress to block the program.
The NRA opposed using taggants, saying they would contaminate some explosives used by gun hobbyists, like old-fashioned gunpowder called black powder and the newer smokeless powder. It said people who liked to fire antique rifles or who loaded their own ammunition would have to use less accurate gunpowder.
Let’s not forget what Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, said shortly after that terrorist act in Oklahoma City. LaPierre went on the attack against law enforcement, comparing federal agents to the Nazis and calling them “jack-booted thugs.”
Former president George H.W. Bush then resigned from the NRA in protest, but LaPierre kept his job, which speaks volumes.
As for taggants, the “study” the NRA cites to show that good science found taggants would make gunpowder less reliable and would not work was in fact only a review of the literature.
Anyone who actually reads the 1980 report, “Taggants in Explosives,” will find this revealing line by the Office of Technology Assessment: “Due to severe time constraints, OTA did little original research.”
Technology has advanced since that report, which is so old that it was prepared on a typewriter.
We can get identifiers put in gunpowders because of technological advances, just as reports get prepared these days on computers. And if “good science” says existing taggants fall short, then Congress can fund research to develop taggants that work without degrading the quality of the explosive charge in bullets.
But as the votes in the Senate killing modest gun regulation and controls on gun trafficking showed this week, what stands firmly in the way of reducing mass murders and bombings is one organization and its backers.
We can change that, once the public understands that the NRA is not so much a defender of Second Amendment rights as a lobby for enabling mass murder.
By: David Cay Johnson, The National Memo, April 20, 2013
“Fewer And Fewer Regulators To Ensure Safety”: Austerity, Deregulation And The Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion
Last evening, a fertilizer plant owned by Adair Grain Inc. in West, Texas caught fire, then exploded, killing several people and wounding at least one hundred. The blast, caught on video from afar, destroyed nearby homes, businesses and a nursing home for seniors. There are still lingering questions about how this happened, but documents suggest the plant faced little regulatory scrutiny.
The Dallas Morning News reported that the plant filed papers with state and federal environmental regulators in 2006 claiming that there were “no” fire or explosive risks at the plant. “The worst possible scenario, the report said, would be a ten-minute release of ammonia gas that would kill or injure no one,” noted reporter Randy Lee Loftis. Residents complained about the smell of ammonia as they “went to bed” that year, according to a filing.
As I pointed out on Twitter last night, in the last five years, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has only inspected five fertilizer plants in the entire state of Texas—and the plant in West, Texas was not one of them. OSHA is severely understaffed and operates with a tiny federal budget. With the agency’s current resources, that means “OSHA can inspect a workplace on average once every 129 years and state OSHA inspectors could inspect one every 67 years.”
There are specialized inspectors for chemical plants that, in theory, should have covered where OSHA or environmental regulators left off. The US Chemical Safety Board, which came into operation in 1998, is the commission tasked with investigating safety violations. Like similar boards, the Chemical Safety Board has virtually no resources: only a $10 million budget to cover every violation in the country. The Center for Public Integrity has a new, incredibly damning report, showing that the agency has failed to investigate several recent disasters, including the death of a worker at refinery in Memphis last December.
Budget cuts, and the sequestration, loom large as every federal workforce is scaled back. Rather than provoking reform, at least in the short term, tragedies like this may get worse as there are fewer and fewer regulators to ensure safety at these types of facilities.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, April 18, 2013
“Laughing Hyenas”: Props Of An Extremist Fringe Who Have Completely Lost Their Way And Any Sense Of Decency
The 41 Republican and four Democratic senators who voted to filibuster a bipartisan gun sale background check bill yesterday are rightfully losing friends quickly. After all, the bill they blocked was supported by over 90 percent of voters and 90 percent of gun owners. The backlash appropriately started the moment they voted to filibuster, as Patricia Maisch, a survivor of the 2011 Tucson mass shooting, yelled “Shame on you!” from the Senate balcony and told reporters “They have no soul. They have no compassion for the experiences people have lived through.” They then heard from President Obama, who called it a “shameful day for Washington.” Then, this morning they woke up to a no-holds-barred op-ed from former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, another tenacious survivor of the Tucson shooting, calling for every single one of them to be ousted from their jobs.
But these 45 senators still have friends. And it’s very telling who those friends are. The lobbying group Gun Owners of America immediately sent an email to its supporters praising the filibuster and taunting background check proponents, saying, “Well, guess who’s laughing now?” This is the same group that has claimed that expanded background checks would lead to a genocide against Christians, a Minority Report-style “pre-crime unit”, and even a race war.
Also happy with the filibuster was the National Association For Gun Rights, which called the background checks bill “draconian” and claimed it would lead to “confiscation” by “gun grabbers.”
And, of course, the National Rifle Association — the group that suggested the way to stop future school shootings was to put more guns in schools — was thrilled and “grateful” to the senators who had blocked the bill.
In his speech after the vote yesterday, President Obama said, “The American people are trying to figure out, how can something have 90 percent support and yet not happen?” It can only happen if the other 10 percent has many times more power than you or I. And yesterday, these out-of-touch, extremist groups were celebrating the fact that they still had that power to stop any and all measures to curb gun violence.
Part of the reason that these groups are the ones “laughing now” is that they have the combined support of a wide array of conservative lobbying groups. As a recent People For the American Way report put it:
The NRA is not alone in attempting to prevent effective regulation of guns and promoting reckless policies that leave Americans vulnerable to crime. Its efforts are supported by the same kind of coalition that undermines the nation’s ability to solve a wide range of problems. Corporations, right-wing ideologues, and Religious Right leaders work together to misinform Americans, generate unfounded fears, and prevent passage of broadly supported solutions.
Although there was lots of competition for this dubious distinction, in one of the most offensive comments made by an opponent of efforts to curb gun violence, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky accused President Obama of using the families of massacred Newtown, Connecticut schoolchildren as “props.” Sen. Paul and his colleagues should consider whether it is they themselves who have become the props of an extremist fringe who have completely lost their way and any sense of decency.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, April 18, 2013
“Not Even In The Game”: Lawmakers Who Set A Poor Example
It’s been a difficult week for so many Americans. As recently as last weekend — which seems like months ago — many were concerned about a missile test from nuclear-armed North Korea. Since then, we’ve seen the bloodshed in Boston, the deadly explosion in Texas, the ricin letters, Midwestern flooding, and a Senate minority ignoring the will of 90% of Americans.
It can be a bit much, and when people are feeling on edge, they need to see their elected officials operating at their very best. The vast majority of officials, known and unknown, have been exemplary.
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), however, appears to be falling far short of this standard.
It didn’t take long for a lawmaker to pick up the latest right-wing conspiracy theory about the Boston Marathon bombings. Just hours after controversial terrorism expert Steve Emerson reported [Wednesday] night on Sean Hannity’s show that unnamed “sources” told him the government was quietly deporting the Saudi national who was initially suspected in the bombing, South Carolina GOP Rep. Jeff Duncan grilled Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on the rumor at a hearing [Thursday] morning.
Duncan, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency, presented the conspiracy theory as fact, chastising Napolitano for deporting a terror suspect (who, in reality, isn’t being deported and isn’t a suspect). Napolitano, annoyed, replied, “I don’t know where that rumor came from.”
As it turns out, it came from Hannity’s show, and was pushed very aggressively by Glenn Beck. Drudge and Erick Erickson talked it up, too. All of them were completely wrong.
And while that’s unfortunate, right-wing media personalities aren’t on the House Homeland Security Committee. Duncan is, and he used his official platform to pester the Secretary of Homeland Security, in a public congressional hearing, with bogus information he presented as fact, all because he couldn’t tell the difference between reality and silly conspiracy theories.
Worse, when Napolitano tried to set the record straight, Duncan pressed forward, saying, “He is being deported.” Except, of course, the person in question is not. When the far-right congressman continued to spout nonsense, Napolitano effectively gave up, saying Duncan’s inquiries are “full of misstatements and misapprehensions,” and “not worthy of an answer.”
Wait, it gets even worse.
Aviva Shen noted a separate exchange from the same hearing.
In a House hearing Thursday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was sidetracked from her testimony on the DHS budget when Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) asked her to respond to an online conspiracy theory about the DHS supposedly stockpiling ammo for an attack on Americans. Duncan argued this was more credible than mere “Internet rumors” because the Drudge Report, a popular conservative aggregator, said it was true.
It’s a difficult time, and Americans need sensible policymakers to keep their heads on straight, serving at the top of their game. In other words, the country needs officials who aren’t acting like Jeff Duncan.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 19, 2013
“Impervious To Logic”: Congress Betrays Our Dwindling Faith
The way to stay sane in this city is never to expect too much.
So the soothing mantras of the capital involve admonitions about the art of the possible, the perfect and the good, the zen of baby steps.
Incremental, incremental, incremental.
Still, it is hard to remain calm in the face of the Senate’s failure — its failure as the parents of children murdered in Newtown, Conn., looked on from the gallery — to pass the most modest of measures to curb gun violence.
We tend to speak easily here of how Washington is broken and gridlocked.
But those of us whose day jobs sit at the intersection of politics and public policy don’t completely buy it. We retain ragged shreds of faith that Washington, despite its maddening imperfections, remains capable of rising to at least some occasions.
Except on Wednesday, it didn’t, as the Senate fell six votes short of the 60 required to expand background checks for gun buyers. It is an indication of the perennially warped politics of guns that politicians can more safely support same-sex marriage than background checks. Indeed, what passed Congress in 1994 — an assault weapons ban and strict limits on magazine sizes — is now unthinkable.
The background-check measure proposed by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey is — I’ll refrain from the past tense, because Wednesday’s loss was not the final chapter — so sensible, so pared-down, that the stronger argument against it is that it failed to go far enough, not that it ran roughshod over the Second Amendment.
To review: Under current law, individuals who want to buy guns from licensed dealers must pass background checks. Manchin-Toomey would expand that requirement to in-state gun sales over the Internet (interstate sales are already covered, because the guns can be sent only to licensed dealers for transfer to the buyer), to gun shows and to other commercial transactions.
It would not apply to sales or transfers between family members and friends — notwithstanding the National Rifle Association’s claim that it would “criminalize the private transfer of firearms by honest citizens, requiring lifelong friends, neighbors and some family members to get federal government permission to exercise a fundamental right or face prosecution.”
As Manchin said on the Senate floor, “That is simply a lie. . . . You can loan your hunting rifle to your buddy without any new restrictions. . . .You can give or sell a gun to your brother or your sister, your cousin, your uncle, your co-worker without a background check. You can post a gun for sale on the cork bulletin board at your workplace or on your church bulletin board without a background check.”
Another criticism of the measure — that it “would put us inexorably on the path to a national gun registry,” as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) put it — is even less moored to reality. A national registry is banned under existing law; Manchin-Toomey would layer on a 15-year felony sentence for anyone who tries to implement one.
That leaves an array of other arguments against the measure that fail the simplest tests of logic.
Felons and others ineligible to buy weapons aren’t being prosecuted under the current system. Also, the existing system fails to list numerous individuals already prohibited from having guns. Okay, prosecute the ineligible would-be buyers and fix the list.
Expanded background checks wouldn’t have prevented the Newtown shootings. Okay, but expanded checks might prevent another killer. No single change is going to prevent every episode of gun violence.
Expanded checks would impose a burden on law-abiding citizens without preventing criminals from obtaining guns. Under the existing system, more than 2 million people have been barred from buying guns. Did some of them go on to obtain weapons illegally? Of course. But others were deterred — and in any event the expanded checks would narrow the currently huge loophole that lets felons buy guns without background checks. That some criminals will always break some laws is not an argument against having those laws in the first place.
The depressing aspect of Wednesday’s vote is that the change was so small and the senators so seemingly impervious to logic.
Wednesday’s vote will not end the gun debate. After nearly two decades in which Democrats barely dared whisper about gun violence, the notion of new restrictions has become safe again — to broach, if not to enact. In the aftermath of Newtown, this time was different.
It just wasn’t different enough.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 18, 2013
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