The GAO found 91% of people on the FBI terrorist watchlist who tried to buy firearms in the U.S. succeeded.

Firearms are easy to obtain in the United States—even if you’re a suspected terrorist. Christopher Ingraham reports:

"Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law," the Government Accountability Office concluded in 2010. The law prohibits felons, fugitives, drug addicts and domestic abusers from purchasing a firearm in the United States. But people on the FBI's consolidated terrorist watchlist — typically placed there when there is "reasonable suspicion" that they are a known or suspected terrorist — can freely purchase handguns or assault-style rifles. And, as the GAO found, a number of them do: Between 2004 and 2014, suspected terrorists attempted to purchase guns from American dealers at least 2,233 times. And in 2,043 of those cases — 91 percent of the time — they succeeded. There are about 700,000 people on the watch-list — a point that civil libertarians have made to underscore that many on the list may be family members or acquaintances of people with potential terrorist connections.

Now there are a lot of problems with the terrorist watchlist. As Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux have noted, the guidelines for putting people on the list don’t require any evidence they are actually linked to a terrorist organization. That means a lot of people on the list shouldn’t be, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them:

“Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future,” says Hina Shamsi, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.” Shamsi, who reviewed the [guidelines] document, added, “These criteria should never have been kept secret.”

So, clearly, the watchlist itself needs improvement and that ought to come first. But nonetheless, there surely are many thousands of people who are legitimately on the list. And those who are should surely be barred from legally obtaining firearms.

But as usual, the National Rifle Association has stood in the way of legislation that is designed to prohibit terrorists from purchasing firearms legally, and that obstructionism goes back to 2007.