@glitterbag,
glitterbag wrote:
Today in the Congress a bill was squashed that would prevent people on the no-fly list from buying guns. In other words, you can be prevented from boarding an airplane, but you can still buy all the guns your heart desires.
Lets give a big shout out to the NRA for making sure that potential terrorists in the US can still buy lots and lots of guns and build bombs. I think the NRA has perverted the intent of the second amendment.
280,000 of the those on the No-Fly list (close to 50% of the entire list) have no recognized terrorist group affiliations. The list relies on names not identities, and so if if you happen to share a name with someone who might actually have ties, your name goes on the list. It's how Senator Ted Kennedy and
Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes found themselves appearing on the list when they tried to board a plane one day.
Here's how the ACLU (sinister, pro-gun, sister-group of the NRA) has spoken of the list:
Quote:The government is adding people to its already bloated watchlisting system at breakneck pace, and it’s still hungry for more. That’s the unavoidable conclusion from documents published yesterday in The Intercept.
Those documents vindicate our concerns and warnings about a massive, virtually standardless government watchlisting scheme that ensnares innocent people and encourages racial and religious profiling.
The documents confirm what we have long suspected: It doesn’t take much to get yourself on a terrorist watchlist. The government’s recently leaked Watchlisting Guidance starts with a poorly defined “reasonable suspicion” standard and then subjects it to so many exceptions and caveats as to render it virtually toothless. The unsurprising result, as is clear from these documents, is a set of watchlists experiencing explosive growth.
And once your name get's on the list, unless you are a US Senator or a nationally recognized journalist, you will have a hell of a time getting it off. There is no established process of appeal; no judicial oversight. Effectively, you are guilty until proven innocent, and often if you can prove you are innocent...the government still considers you guilty.
Whether you like it or not, the right to bear arms is protected by the US Constitution and cannot be restricted without serious cause. There is nothing serious about the process of building the No-fly List.
Usually you are more knowledgeable about these subjects, but I suppose the average person who maintains a naive belief that in matters like these, The Government doesn't make mistakes, and certainly not egregious ones, can be forgiven for finding it perfectly logical and quite sound to restrict gun ownership for anyone whose name appears on a governmental list of potential terrorists. However, even that description of the No-Fly List should give true liberals pause.
At best it is a list of
possible or
potential terrorists, and I sincerely doubt you favor the suspension or revocation of the civil rights of people who The Government
believes may potentially be criminals. It is not even a list of people legally charged with terrorism, and we know, full well, it is a list on which a great many people who are, in fact, not even remotely potential terrorists find themselves.
So yes, driven by fear of a horrific threat, I guess I can understand how some may be led to overacting. I won't even suggest that the average progressive sees this issue as a convenient means to implement one part of a plan to severely restrict the exercise of the 2nd Amendment, but progressive journalists and political leaders? That's an entirely different matter.
Does anyone believe that President Obama doesn't fully understand the actual nature and short comings of the No-Fly List? Does anyone believe he didn't know that Teddy Kennedy found his name on the list?
And yet this illiberal, liberal president of ours, the supposed Constitutional scholar, had the shameless audacity to go on TV shortly after this tragedy and make the following comment:
Quote:And for those who are concerned about terrorism, some may be aware of the fact that we have a no-fly list where people can’t get on planes, but those same people who we don’t allow to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them. That’s a law that needs to be changed.
That
law that allows them to go into that store and buy that firearm, is the Constitution and that's what he is saying needs to be changed. Of course he has no intention of leading an organized effort to amend the Constitution, as that has zero chance of success and, in any case, he only has a little more than a year left in his presidency. Any effort to amend the Constitution so that it weakened or effectively disarmed (pun obviously intended) the 2nd Amendment would take far more than a year and therefore, if it eventually, and miraculously, worked, he wouldn't be able to claims it as part of his precious
Legacy.
Instead he will employ Executive Orders based on authority he does not have to come as close as possible to making it as difficult as possible (and next to impossible if he can) for the average citizen to purchase a gun. All the while he and Democrat leaders (politicians and pundits alike) will be insisting that
"No one wants to take away an American's right to own guns!"
It has been pointed out, on far more than one occasion, that none of the increased requirements and/or restrictions that he and his fellow Democrats have been proposing would have prevented the shooters from obtaining the firearms they used in the slaughter in San Bernardino. Apparently, though, President Obama didn't have his TV on when this fact was being pointed out, and perhaps the family dog tore up the pages of his favorite newspapers on the days they printed columns of pundits who were writing about the very same fact.
But then, this fact has never made a difference before so why should it now?
Demagogues always frame problems in the simplest of terms (they have to, their populists) and rely upon the shallowness of their constituents' understanding of an issue, and their pre-established inclination towards certain results, to generate a favorable response to solutions that are, at best, totally ineffective, and, at worst, smoke screens designed to hide the actual intentions and agenda of the populist.
"If you're worried about terrorists, (and, of course, I'm not saying those two Muslims in California were terrorists), then doesn't it make simple sense to prohibit known terrorists and their associates (Hey, they wouldn't be on the No-Fly List if there wasn't something fishy about them.) from buying guns?"
Another tactic, which populists can be relied upon to employ, is to either ridicule and minimize their critics and opponents, or to demonize them. Within Obama's and the Left's rhetoric in this matter is, and will continue to be, the implicit or explicit assertion that his solution is so obviously simple, and so obviously guaranteed of success, that his opponents are either dim-wits or
they want madmen and terrorists to be able to buy guns...or at least their gun fetish is so extreme and their subservience to the NRA and gun manufacturers so complete that
they don't care if madmen and terrorists obtain guns.
Either way they are the Enemy of America's safety and have got to be stopped...just like those millions of conservative brownshirts who are planning to use their stockpiled automatic weapons and high capacity ammo clips to unleash a horrific backlash against Muslims in America...the next time Donald Trump blows his dog whistle!
