NY Daily News: Paris Terror Attacks Highlight Threat Posed by NRA

On November 18, the New York Daily News suggested the Paris terror attacks highlight the threat the National Rifle Association (NRA) poses to the U.S.

Although those attacks happened in a country with restrictive gun controls, which include expanded background checks and total gun bans on entire categories of firearms–thus demonstrating the impotency of such controls–the Daily News claims the NRA’s refusal to support more gun control in the U.S. is itself a form of jihad against the American people. They are specifically focused on the NRA’s opposition to expanding background checks to include people on the no-fly list.

According to the newspaper, “America’s porous gun laws empower dealers to sell weapons to essentially any adult who passes a background check. Very few classes of people are disqualified. Convicted felons are among those barred. Individuals named on the consolidated government terrorism watchlist are not.”

In an attempt to make its point, the Daily News focuses on how many people the terrorists–armed with “assault weapons”–were able to kill in a 30-minute shooting spree: “In taking 129 lives in little more than half an hour, the Paris attackers showed how deadly assault weapons can be in the hands of determined killers.” But they leave out a crucial point. Namely, that terrorists armed with revolvers would have been able to kill a high number of people in the same amount of time because the people being shot did not have the capacity to shoot back. The outlet completely glosses over the fact that the restrictive gun laws in France guaranteed that the attackers would not be facing gunfire as they methodically moved through and shot at masses of people who had been disarmed by their own government.

Regarding the push to expand background checks to include names on the no-fly list, the reasons behind the NRA’s opposition to this has been well-documented; it is an opposition based largely on the fact that gun control is insidious, and once background checks begin to be expanded to add this category or that category, doing away with private gun sales altogether will be easier for Democrats to accomplish.

The New York Times made these same allegations against the NRA in February, and Breitbart News responded:

If there are people in this country who are believed to be so prone to terror attacks that we have to keep them away from firearms–or keep firearms away from them–the solution is not to punish the hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans via the passage of more gun control. Rather, it is to deport or lock up those who pose a threat to society, whatever the case may be.

And that point is still applicable now. If the Syrian refugees President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats want to bring to the United States pose such a risk that our gun laws have been changed to accommodate their presence, then perhaps we should rethink bringing them, rather than infringing on the only Amendment the Founding Fathers wrote “shall not be infringed.”

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.