The trolls, Fly said, were pushing inflammatory pro- and anti-gun control messages within hours of the killings, with “Russian accounts that were jumping on both sides, basically egging Americans on, making everyone angrier, trying to divide us rather than bring us together in a moment of crisis.” The Hamilton findings were widely cited by news organizations from the New York Times to CNN.

…Ever since the new Mueller charges, Trump and his defenders have stopped for the most part outright denying the Russian meddling in 2016 took place and switched to claiming both that allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election are overblown and inconsequential, and also that President Obama was too weak in responding to it. The confusing, contradictory and blame-gaming approach was perfectly summed up by a Trump tweet posted Saturday: “this whole Witch Hunt is an illegal disgrace,” he wrote, “and Obama did nothing about Russia!”

…At one point in our conversation, I asked Rosenberger whether she thought the Russian propagandists really had affected the outcome of the election, a subject of renewed hot debate across social media ever since the Mueller indictments.

“It’s the wrong question to be asking,” she insisted. “Because, to me, the reality is that the Russians are attacking our country. … And so I think that defining this in terms of the election and trying to parse whether or not this tweet reached that many people and could it have affected X, Y and Z, I mean, the reality is we’re still learning the entirety of this thing. We may never know the entirety of it.”

…“Our project starts with the premise that both parties and presidents of both parties have made mistakes vis-à-vis Russia over the last several decades,” said Fly.

…[Fly] added, “I never imagined in my wildest dreams that this would be something that would actually be turned against America. And I think it’s a failure of imagination that unfortunately many in our national security community had about this. There was always this perception that there was some red line that Putin would never cross.”

The Russian Bots Are Coming. This Bipartisan Duo Is On It. – POLITICO Magazine

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…When we worry and wonder about authoritarian regimes that inflict cruelty on civilians, we often imagine tyrannical despots unilaterally advancing their sinister agendas. But no would-be autocrat can act alone. As a practical matter, he needs subordinates willing to carry out orders.

This should not be a surprise. The famous Milgram experiment and subsequent studies suggest that many people will obey instructions from an authority figure, even if it means harming another person. It is also perfectly understandable (which does not mean it is justifiable). How many of us would refuse to follow an instruction from a superior at work? It is natural to want to keep one’s job, even if at the price of inflicting cruelty on another human being, even perhaps a child.

…The question we need to ask ourselves is: What will we do? This is not a hypothetical question. Most of us will not face the stark choice employees at airports faced over the weekend. But we are all democratic citizens. Ultimately, our government can only act if we allow it to act.

Ordinary Americans carried out inhumane acts for Trump – Baltimore Sun

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LaPierre got a lot wrong when describing a rescinded Obama-era rule requiring the Social Security Administration to report certain mentally disabled beneficiaries to the federal database used to conduct gun background checks.

He said the rule applied to “an elderly couple” simply “because they sought help to do their taxes.” But it didn’t single out anyone for that reason. It covered 18- to 65-year-olds receiving disability benefits — not retirement payments — due to a diagnosed mental condition.

…In fact, the SSA rule said that in order to be reported, individuals had to meet five criteria, including having a severe mental health issue and being unable to manage their benefits. It also allowed affected individuals to petition for the ability to obtain a gun, provided they could demonstrate that they posed no threat to the public.

…After the Brady bill became law, the NRA sued to prevent the federal government from temporarily retaining any information on the approved gun sale and gun buyer. It also has consistently opposed expanding background checks to include private gun sales and transfers, including those at gun shows and on the internet.

NRA Chief’s Bogus Background Check Claims – FactCheck.org

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Florida Shooting Survivor Suggests Calling AR-15 Rifles ‘Marco Rubios’ | HuffPost

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There’s no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated.

…There is no national database of guns. We have no centralized record of who owns all the firearms we so vigorously debate, no hard data regarding how many people own them, how many of them are bought or sold, or how many even exist.

…Federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America’s gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It’s kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.

…The vast majority of the gun records linking a gun to its owner are kept back at the various licensed dealers, the Walmarts, Bob’s Gun Shops, and Guns R Us stores dotting America’s landscape.

We have more gun retailers in America than we do supermarkets, more than 55,000 of them. We’re talking nearly four times the number of McDonald’s. Nobody knows how many guns that equals, but in 2013, U.S. gun manufacturers rolled out 10,844,792 guns, and we imported an additional 5,539,539.

…Matching a firearm to a person—tracing a gun—is therefore a needle-in-a-haystack proposition that depends on Form 4473. To the people at the tracing center, locating that document is the whole object of the game. It’s the holy grail. The form has the gun purchaser’s signature on it, his or her address, place and date of birth, height, weight, gender, ethnicity, race, and, sometimes, Social Security number (“Optional, but will help prevent misidentification,” says box 8).

It’s a jackpot of information that could help solve a murder case, or exonerate an innocent guy on death row, or, as happens frequently, open unexpected investigative leads.

…By law, every gun dealer in America has to keep a “bound book” or an “orderly arrangement of loose-leaf pages” (some have been known to use toilet paper in protest) to record every firearm’s manufacturer or importer, model, serial number, type, caliber or gauge, date received, date of sale. This record corresponds to the store’s stack of 4473s, which some clerk has to go dig through in order to read you the information from the form. Or he can fax it.

…This is the maddening, inefficient way gun tracing works, and there is no effort afoot to make it work any better. For all the talking we do about imposing new limits on assault weapons, or stronger background checks, nobody talks about fixing the way we keep track—or don’t keep track—of where all the guns are.

Inside The Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns | GQ

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Tweets about contaminated water, tainted turkey look to security experts like practice for the political season

Russian Trolls Tweeted Disinformation Long Before U.S. Election

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