This excuse always always comes up when the perpetrator is a white supremacist and pretty much never when they are any other variety of terrorist.
He is a disabled person clearly not qualified to buy firearms. The store would not sell him a real rifle on his first attempt, so the FBI agents told him to buy a pellet gun.
It would have been a “hilarious prank” if he didn’t end up spending 3 years in federal custody. TBF he was probably a lot better off in federal custody than in his normal day to day, so hard to say if this was really a bad thing for him.
Still, it’s frustrating to know that the resources of the FBI are spent on pranking disabled people.
Cursory research will produce the following links:
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/15/fbi-undercover-isis-teen...
>Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots.
https://www.cair.com/blog/fbi-entrapment-harms-vulnerable-mu...
>Every day was the same for Khalil Abu Rayyan, 21, a depressed pizza delivery man from Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Working for a pizzeria in Detroit, he’d drive late nights on desolate inner city streets...
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/29/politics/aby-rayyan-fbi-t...
>“We are tremendously pleased that our clients are on their way home -- even if it’s fourteen years too late,” said Amith R. Gupta, part of a group of lawyers representing Payen and the Willamses, who are not related. Gupta in his statement described the three as destitute men “entrapped for their race, religion, and working-class backgrounds by a government looking to spread fear of Muslims and justify bloated budgets.”
https://apnews.com/article/newburgh-four-terrorism-sting-fbi...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I agree in that there's hypocrisy on either side. You'll also find commenters on this site who cite the FBI claiming, "White supremacists are the number one terror threat". Meanwhile, mass media pundits sought to paint all of their political opponents as racists. Comments echoing that talking point were also prevalent on HN. Thankfully, that narrative has mostly moved out of popular imagination.
From my perspective the pendulum swings between targeted groups. Each respective group has their turn to run the gauntlets of media demonization and security service targeting. Many of the same people who were cheering the expanses of the security state during the heights of the War on Terror clutch peals when the pendulum swings back upon their demographic. Each tribe has their chance to shout down the 'others'. We shouldn't be surprised if similar tactics are used to pursue the formerly favored BLM activists in the coming years. The only constant is the expansion of the security state. Classic divide and conquer.
The FBI has been running this playbook since at least the 50s. Other commenters on HN have rightly compared it to Soviet internal security policies. There's nothing truly new under the sun. Human nature is tribal and there will always be those who seek to exploit it to gain power. The judgement of whether this is deliberate or the result of natural incentives such as career advancement and political necessity is an exercise for the reader.