Yes, Mr. President, People on Secret Government Lists Should Be Able to Buy Guns
Are we supposed to accept that Congress has the power to strip people of their Second Amendment rights without any due process?
Are we supposed to accept that Congress has the power to strip people of their Second Amendment rights without any due process?
I n his State of the Union address yesterday, President Joe Biden wondered why American citizens who are placed on secret government lists by bureaucrats aren’t being denied their constitutional rights:
I ask Congress to pass proven measures to reduce gun violence. Pass universal background checks. Why should anyone on the terrorist list be able to purchase a weapon? Why? Why?
Well, I suppose we can start with the Second and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The terror watch list (last estimated to have almost 2 million names on it) and no-fly list (tens of thousands) are tools used by law enforcement to monitor potential threats, not to adjudicate guilt or innocence. The last time Senate Democrats tried to pass a bill weaponizing this monitoring tool, they proposed banning not only those currently on lists from owning guns, but anyone whose name was on a list in the “preceding five years.”
A 2014 leak found that nearly 40 percent of the names on the terror watch list weren’t even tangentially associated with any recognized terrorist organization, and no effort was made to explain why. Those people have no real way to challenge the designation, and the government isn’t required to tell them they’re on list, anyway. Civil-rights hero John Lewis, by the way, was once on the no-fly list. According to the late congressman, he was stopped 35 to 40 times at the airport in a single year. If it’s difficult for a well-known elected official to clear his name, imagine what an average person will go through.
Let’s put it another way: Imagine a president arguing that Americans should lose their right to vote simply because some cops put their names on a secret government document.
Even if we concede that these lists have been compiled and operated in good faith by law enforcement, they are ripe for abuse. How many times in recent years have partisans smeared political opponents as “terrorists?” Last fall, the National School Boards Association (on the advice of the Biden administration) asked the feds to designate “threats” against schools boards as acts of “domestic terrorism.” Merrick Garland, who complied with the request, could easily have put parents who yell at elected school officials about lockdowns and masking policies on a terror watch list.
The president didn’t stop with watch lists:
And folks, ban assault weapons with high-capacity magazines that hold up to a hundred rounds. You think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests?
Look, repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued. The only one.
The Second Amendment, as Biden, who graduated in the top half of his law class surely understands, has nothing to do with hunting. And no matter how many times the president declares that gunmakers are afforded special liability protections, it will always be untrue. Gunmakers are liable for damages resulting from defects, negligence, breach of contract, and so on, just like a car manufacturer or a home builder. Democrats propose denying gunmakers equal legal protections, opening the floodgates for activists to sue them for selling an unsafe product. And, indeed, guns are most definitely a lethal weapon. That’s the point. That’s why the Second Amendment protects them.
All of us should be outraged that a president is using the threat of terrorism to scaremonger voters into supporting the suspension of due-process rights. These days the contemporary Left is fine with elected officials’ using opaque law-enforcement tools to strip citizens — mostly Muslim Americans — of their rights. It is a big turnaround, to say the least, from the George W. Bush years.
The only limiting principles these Democrats believe in are their own political aims. Because if we accept that Congress has the power to strip people of their Second Amendment rights without any due process, why not their Fifth Amendment protections as well? Why aren’t Democrats arresting all these terrorists who are walking around trying to buy guns? Why? Why?