Valdez: Refugees need the gun lobby

In the GOP-led Congress, Syrian refugee children are considered a bigger threat than suspected terrorists walking into a gun store near you.

The GOP-controlled Congress rejects the refugees – despite extensive background checks – but those intrepid Republicans are fine with U.S.-based suspects on the FBI’s Terrorist Watchlist buying weapons.

In America, you may be dangerous enough to land on the no-fly list, but you can still buy a weapon of mass murder.

All hail the Second Amendment.

The National Rifle Association doesn’t like the idea of banning bad guys from getting guns, so Congress punts. In fact, Congress has been doing the NRA’s bidding on this issue since 2007, when the Bush administration first proposed the Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act.

In the last 11 years, more than 2,000 suspects on the terrorist watch list bought weapons in the good old U.S. of A, according to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office. Those suspected terrorists were able to pass the required background check more than 90 percent of the time.

After the Paris attacks, Democrats in Congress renewed efforts to prevent suspected terrorists from legally buying weapons. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s bill to accomplish this had been around since February.

She thought what happened in Paris might help shake loose some support.

It didn’t.

An editorial in the New York Daily News called members of Congress who refuse to move this legislation “radical fundamentalists of the Second Amendment kind.”

That has a nice deadly ring.

These Second Amendment fundamentalists not only protect the gun “rights” of random lunatics who turn schools, theaters, shopping centers and colleges into shooting galleries.

The NRA’s lackeys in Congress also protect terrorists who want to buy guns.

There is no good, common sense reason to oppose a bill designed to keep guns away from terrorists.

There is only the NRA.

There is only the cowardice of those in Congress who sit down and shut up when the NRA says so.

If only 5-year-old orphan refugees had that kind of lobby.