On Wednesday, three days after the worst mass shooting in recent U.S. history, Donald Trump said he would be meeting with the National Rifle Association to discuss banning people on the so-called “terror watch list” from buying firearms.
I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2016
Since the Orlando shooting, Democrats in Congress have also focused on legislation to target those who have been labeled as potential terrorists by the federal government, knowing that it could be a politically savvy way to get their colleagues across the aisle to move on gun control. Hillary Clinton and President Obama have also indicated their renewed support for the ban, which was brought to a vote in the Senate after the shooting in San Bernardino, California last year, but ultimately failed.
Lawmakers and advocates in support of this type of ban like to point out that nine in ten people on the terror watch list who sought guns were approved in 2015, or that people being investigated for terrorism ties are not allowed to board planes, but can still purchase firearms.
But the reality is that many of the people on the so-called “no fly list” do not belong there, and passing this type of bill could undermine people’s civil liberties.
As the Huffington Post wrote Tuesday, by opposing this type of ban the NRA “has actually got something right on gun control.”
On this front, the NRA has forcefully and successfully argued government watch lists are constitutionally problematic because they’re bloated and sweep far too broadly, ensnaring innocent Americans that otherwise pose no threat to national security — including one prominent U.S. senator, media pundits, executives, even babies, and the late Nelson Mandela.
The size of the no-fly list, which names people who are banned from boarding flights in or out of the U.S., has drastically grown since September 11, 2001, from just 16 people to as many as 64,000 in 2014. And the more broad “terrorist watch list,” maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, had roughly 800,000 people as of September 2014.
The list has incorrectly included people with no ties to terrorists, like former Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford doctoral candidate and mother of four. Many people do not even learn they are on the list until they try to board a plane, at which there is no way to correct a potential error other than a legal battle. Ibrahim fought that battle in court and it took her years to find out why she had been put on the no-fly list in the first place.http://archive.thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/12/07/3728943/no-fly-terrorist-watch-list-guns/The American Civil Liberties Union, which is involved in litigation challenging the federal government’s use of terrorist watch lists, has sided with the NRA on this issue. In a post on the ACLU’s website, Hina Shamsi, director of ACLU National Security Project, wrote in December that “until the no fly list is fixed, it shouldn’t be used to restrict people’s freedoms.”
“There’s no constitutional bar for the reasonable regulation of guns,” she told the Huffington Post. “And government watch lists could theoretically serves as a means to do that, but only with major overhaul of the watch-listing system because it uses vague and overbroad standards, the result of which innocent people are blacklisted without a fair process to correct government error.”
Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub early Sunday morning, was not on an FBI watch list at the time he purchased his weapons, although he did appear on the list twice in the last three years when the federal government was investigating him for terrorist ties. If Congress were to pass the same legislation that it considered last year, Mateen would likely still have been permitted to purchase the firearms he used in his massacre.
Even if Mateen had been blocked from buying a gun because of his connection to terrorism, he could have still obtained guns — including assault weapons — legally from a private seller at a gun show or online because Congress has blocked efforts to close the background check loophole.