On Monday, anti-gun New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg announced the “Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2009,” a bill that would give unprecedented authority to the Attorney General to prohibit someone from exercising his or her Second Amendment rights based on nothing more than mere suspicion.
Lautenberg launched this attack on gun rights, using a report from the Government Accountability Office that laments it found 963 cases between February 2004 and February 2009 in which “a known or suspected terrorist attempted to buy a gun.”
Yet, as Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the grassroots-oriented Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, noted in a response to Lautenberg’s bill, 90 percent of those transactions were allowed to proceed after the gun buyer cleared the FBI’s National Instant Check. The remaining ten percent of the purchase attempts were unsuccessful because the would-be buyers had prior felony convictions, or were found to be in this country illegally. Were any of these people arrested or deported?
There is no indication from the GAO whether any of the successful gun buyers used their firearms in the commission of a crime.
In Lautenberg’s world view, any American citizen interested in owning a gun is a potential terrorist. Would he add all of our names to such a watch list, thus stripping us of our Second Amendment rights, without first being charged, prosecuted and convicted of some crime? Probably he would. -- Alan Gottlieb, CCRKBA
This is the same GAO that issued a report last week on gun trafficking to Mexico that was discussed here. That’s the report that anti-gunners have been deliberately misrepresenting in order to push their claim that 90 percent of the guns being used by Mexican drug cartels in a bloody war in northern Mexico are coming from gun shops and gun shows in this country.
The claims are so questionable that Florida Congressman Connie Mack noted Friday, “I don't know that the report itself is something that we should put a lot of value in.”
The National Rifle Association weighed in, noting, “Mexico has a huge problem with rampant corruption that clearly cannot be blamed on the U.S. At the same time, Mexico has extremely prohibitive gun laws, yet has far worse crime than the U.S.”
I don't know that the report itself is something that we should put a lot of value in. -- U.S. Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL)
Lautenberg isn’t nearly as interested in protecting this country from terrorists as he is in disarming its citizens. He just wants to hand Eric Holder the authority to deny as many people as possible their rights under the Second Amendment. As Gottlieb observed, Lautenberg has devoted his political career to “stripping as many citizens as possible of their firearm civil rights.” In Lautenberg’s perfect world, Gottlieb asserts, any American citizen who exercises his or her Second Amendment rights would be considered a potential terrorist.
There are problems aplenty with Lautenberg’s demagoguery. For example, in May of this year, the inspector general for the Department of Justice reportedly found that the FBI kept a list that included the names of 24,000 people based, as explained by the New York Times, on “outdated or sometimes irrelevant information.”
In the vast majority of cases reviewed so far, it has turned out that the petitioners were not actually on the list, with most having been misidentified at airports because their names resembled others on it.
Perhaps the greatest problem with such legislation is that nobody has ever explained just how someone gets his or her name on this terrorist watch list.
Likewise, it’s not clear how anyone gets their name off this list, though one apparently can file a “redress” request with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Over the past two years, according to USA Today, some 51,000 people have filed those requests. A review of those complaints, the newspaper reported in March, found that these people had been “misidentified at airports because their names resembled others” on the list.
If an airport check by DHS can make that kind of mistake, what guarantees are there that firearms retailers won’t? Who can say that the Attorney General will not even screw that up, or deliberately deny someone their Second Amendment rights only because their name resembles that of someone else? It takes time to sort out such a denial, and as the late Rev. Martin Luther King noted, “A right delayed is a right denied.”
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Comments
These government collected ‘terrorist watch lists’ don’t just include a bunch of radical Islamic terrorists and their supporters. People just like you and me are on at least some of the governments watch lists. We are there simply because we blog, we speak out, we’re involved in the TEA Party protests, we’re veterans, we are NRA members, we have military combat experience, we own guns and they know that some among us, even though we are American patriots through and through, are a danger to the U.S. government if it were to become the enemy itself. BE AWARE - BE PREPARED - BE SAFE
Politicians are truly trustworthy, no really...honest!
Okay, I'm totally lying to you. I'd rather any, and I mean any, NRA or GOA member in good standing than any politician. There is no need to ask who the real terrorist is in this scenario is there? Anyone who seeks to deny our God-given rights is by definition a terrorist.
Lautenberg you are on notice, and I hope that your constituents wake up and force you to get an honest job come the next election.
What a blatant LIAR Lautenberg is. Yeah, we really put the "rights" of terrorists above "everyday" Americans! This guy couldn't care LESS about the safety of "everyday" (an elitist term for sure) Americans as he attempts to prevent them from protecting themselves every chance he can get. And what about those 963 "known or suspected terrorists"? I suspect that probably about ONE was an actual terrorist IF that. As for "suspected" terrorists are concerned . . . virtually anyone who didn't vote for Obama probably has "incorrect" political views and therefore has a good chance of eventually appearing on that list anyway . . . it's WORTHLESS !
I'm with Samaritan on this one. I'm getting fed up with the Federal Government and I'm willing to throw them all under the bus. These people cannot be trusted, they live insulated lives and most have no inkling how the rest of us live or what our concerns are.
Maybe it is time to make new arrangements for our future liberties and rights...
It is my understanding that Ted Kennedy was also on this list at one time. Now there is a terrorist if I ever saw one!
"Lautenberg isn’t nearly as interested in protecting this country from terrorists as he is in disarming its citizens. He just wants to hand Eric Holder the authority to deny as many people as possible their rights under the Second Amendment." --- He doesn't think much of due process, either. I guess he forgot his oath to uphold the law and the Constitution, as well.
When will the Supreme Court declare the right of U.S. citizens to keep and bear arms as an inalienable right and therefor immune from any "reasonable" or "common sense" restrictions (read that "infringements") by any business, organization, city, county, state, or person, such as Frank Lautenberg, under ANY pretense, especially the ultimate lie that such are necessary to protect those self same citizens from crime? Never, I suspect. The chicken coop appears now to be guarded by the chickenhawks. Thanks for another great article, Dave Workman.
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