WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States is stepping up security at "soft targets" like hotels and shopping malls, as well as trains and ports, as it counters the evolving Al-Qaeda threat, a top official said Sunday.
A year after a foiled plot to bomb a US-bound passenger plane, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told CNN's "State of the Union" program that other places and modes of transportation must now be scrutinized.
"We look at so-called soft targets -- the hotels, shopping malls, for example -- all of which we have reached out to in the past year and have done a fair amount of training for their own employees," Napolitano said.
1. Call the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulation Affairs, Department of Justice, Desk Officer at (202) 395-6466.
2. E-mail Barbara A. Terrell, ATF, Firearms Industry Programs Branch at Barbara.Terrell@atf.gov
3. Call your Senators and Representative: United States Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121
Points to make: 1. Multiple sales reporting of long guns will actually make it more difficult for licensed retailers to help law enforcement as traffickers modify their illegal schemes to circumvent the reporting requirement. Traffickers will go further underground, hiring more people to buy their firearms. This will make it much harder for retailers to identify and report suspicious behavior to law enforcement. 2. Long guns are rarely used in crime (Bureau of Justice Statistics). 3. Imposing multiple sales-reporting requirements for long guns would further add to the already extensive paperwork and record-keeping requirements burdening America's retailers -- where a single mistake could cost them their license and even land them in jail. 4. Last year, ATF inspected 2,000 retailers in border states and only two licenses were revoked (0.1%). These revocations were for reasons unknown and could have had nothing to do with illicit trafficking of guns; furthermore, no dealers were charged with any criminal wrongdoing. 5. According to ATF, the average age of a firearm recovered in the United States is 11 years old. In Mexico it's more than 14 years old. This demonstrates that criminals are not using new guns bought from retailers in the states. 6. Congress, when it enacted multiple sales reporting for handguns, could have required multiple sales of long guns -- it specifically chose not to.
The FBI is assembling a massive database on thousands of Americans, many of whom have not been accused of any crime, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin report. The reporters' latest look at the country's ballooning national security system focuses on the role that local agencies -- often staffed by people with little to no counter-terrorism training -- have played in combating terrorism since 2001.
