I had an interesting conversation the other day with a man I'll just call 'Richard'. I was hawking my book, "Tipping Point", when he mentioned something he had heard or read just recently. "Did you know," he asked, "that people on the 'terrorist watch list' can't fly on an airplane, but they can still buy guns?" He was referring, I think, to a recent video from a California nut-turned-Jihadi exhorting American Muslims to hop on down to the nearest gun show and get a (machine) gun with no background check.
Where do you start if you are to turn back all the erroneous information Richard is now carrying around in his head?
In the first place, machine guns and similar weaponry (grenades, etc.) are and have been heavily regulated since 1934, and no one can get such stuff at gun shows or any other place without a thorough-going FBI background check lasting not just days, but months, during which the FBI will talk to people you've forgotten you ever knew.
Secondly, there is the issue of 'due process' which everyone glosses over so readily. Recall that people on the 'terrorist watch list' are merely suspected, and we have no idea what it is they are suspected of, nor do we know how they got on the TWL, and (as we know from Ted Kennedy's experience) it can be damned difficult to get off that TWL once you're on. Lots of people have the authority to put your name on the list; almost no one has the authority (or the inclination) to take it off. After all, it's not their name that's on the list. Why should they be concerned?
Beyond that, if the government has something more than 'suspicion', the process is: arrest, arraignment, trial, verdict. If the government has nothing more than mere suspicion, how is that an adequate basis for denying a person rights? Perhaps we ought to expand the 'no guns' prohibition to 'no medical treatment' (better if they just die from their wounds, right?) and 'no shopping' (who knows what they might buy? This suspected terrorist might be another McGyver).
If this train of thought makes you question the morality of having a 'terrorist watch list', then my day is complete.
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