April 7, 2009

ARE YOU HAPPY today, NRA? Your message appears to be getting through.

Today, three Pittsburgh police officers are dead, their families bereft, their city and state in shock. While responding to a domestic dispute Saturday, the three were shot and killed by a man wearing body armor and using an AK-47.

Reportedly, the argument between Richard Poplawski, 25, and his mother was over Poplawski's dog peeing on the floor. But a motive for killing the cops might be found in the racist, anti-Semitic Web sites Poplawski read and posted on - and the fact that he was convinced that Barack Obama was going to take away his guns.

But these days, you don't have to log in to an extremist Web site to hear that stuff: The National Rifle Association's overheated rhetoric about "threats" to gun rights are strikingly similar, and they're echoed by other Web sites and, of course, conservative talk radio and Fox News, where TV celebrity wacko Chuck Norris recently called for a "second American revolution."

The paranoid propaganda appears to be working: The FBI reports that, nationwide, requests for gun checks have shot up by millions since Obama was elected - a spike they attribute to the fear that gun purchases will be banned or limited.

Is it another coincidence that 53 people have been killed in mass shootings in the past month?

Among them: 13 people learning English in an immigration-service center in Binghamton, N.Y., on Friday. They were shot by a man wearing body armor - which is illegal - and using semiautomatic weapons.

Also among the recent carnage: Four police officers killed in Oakland, Calif., on March 10. The gun used in that slaughter: an SKS semiautomatic carbine, the same brand of gun used to kill Philadelphia Police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski last year.

A chilling detail: Four of the seven shooters in the recent killings were known to be upset about losing their jobs - a possible trigger of violence that is unlikely to disappear soon…

But with most of America's mayors and law-enforcement officials, Obama supports the repeal of the Tiahrt Amendment, which blocks access to federal gun-trace data, making it more difficult for local law-enforcement agencies to track gun sellers who deal in straw purchases.

Obama used to support a revival of the ban on assault weapons. But in recent weeks, both Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were undercut for suggesting just that. Both recognized that the U.S. is the source of most of the assault weapons used by Mexican drug cartels in the continuing border violence that has killed about 7,000 people so far.

Sadly, another NRA message appears to be getting through - the NRA's threat to work against congressional Democrats who support common-sense gun laws. After Holder suggested reinstituting the ban, 65 House Democrats and two senators immediately fell into line. They claimed the ban would "infringe upon the rights of individual gun owners" - even though the ban that lasted from 1994 to 2004 did nothing of the sort.

Members of Congress are worried about losing their jobs while police officers are losing their lives. Know that advertising slogan, "There's strong and then there's Army-strong"? Here's one for our elected representatives: There's cowardly and then there's congressional-cowardly. *