Pensacola Terrorist Was Reportedly Radicalized Years Prior, Still Allowed to Buy Gun, Continue Flight Training,

More news about the history of Pensacola’s Pr0n Stache’d Terrorist:

The Saudi Air Force officer who killed three American sailors and injured eight others at Naval Air Station Pensacola last week appears to have been radicalized by hardliner clerics years before arriving in the US as part of a training program. 

[…]

Based on his social media activity at the time, Alshamrani had fallen under the influence of four radical Muslim clerics and activists, among them Saudis Abdulaziz al-Turaifi and Ibrahim al-Sakran, Kuwaiti national Hakim al-Mutairi, and Jordan’s Eyad Qunaibi.

Until then, the teenage Alshamrani’s tweets and retweets were mostly limited to poetry and inspirational verses from the Koran, but in late 2015, when he was about 17 years old, his posts took on a political tone.

[…]

Alshamrani also was said to have retweeted tweets from Mutairi, which called for ‘jihad’ against American and Israeli ‘crusaders.’

He was online in broad daylight espousing terrorist rhetoric and threatening jihad a full two years before coming to the United States. How, when accepting foreign nationals into the country for flight training (echoing the beginnings of 9/11, did we not learn?) does the government that promises to keep us safe miss so many obvious warning signs? Where was the vetting of this foreign national?

Also, credit where due: While some in media crafted narratives suggesting that somehow it was a lack of restrictions that contributed to the terrorist accessing firearms, Jorge Ortiz chose his words carefully to accurately reflect the legal nature of the terrorist’s possession (I have said for years that words matter as the invoke different applications of law based on which words are used and how on this matter) in a well-written piece. He touches on the problem, which is that the exception for foreign nationals under certain conditions is literally written into the law. It isn’t an absence of law that allowed this, but rather the law was written specifically to allow it. Why in the world?

I’m not sure of a more obvious case of common ground here than that of clearly unvetted foreign nationals accessing rights affirmed only for American citizens. Meanwhile, despite growing as targets, our American service members are denied access to equal means of self defense.