No Fly No Buy – the Lack of Due Process

There's a lot of talk suggesting that people on the terrorist watch list or the no fly list or whatever similar list should not be able to buy guns.

Hey, that sounds reasonable. Sure, it's arbitrary and unconstitutional to the extreme, but it will make people feel good. Well, that is unless they stop and think it through — this is something many of them fail to do. Not because they're bad necessarily, or because they're out to grind their heels on gun owners cold dead fingers, but because they're heartbroken and appalled about what happened in Orlando (and other places before it). Others will readily and ruthlessly exploit anything to further their anti-gun agenda. The former we should educate. Maybe a little will rub off on the latter.

The fact is, this argument at its core has nothing to do with guns and everything to do with civil liberties. Conservatives want suspected terrorists to be able to buy guns! Well, um…yes. Because a suspected terrorist isn't a convicted terrorist, and last time I checked you're innocent until proven guilty. I'm all about dropping terrorists into black sites, deep, dank prison cells or just letting our SOF guys put 'em in the ground — once we know they're terrorists.

“Tens of thousands of travelers have been misidentified because of misspellings and transcription errors in the nomination process, and because of computer algorithms that imperfectly match travelers against the names on the list.” (9th Circuit Court, Rahinah Ibrahim appeal)

The potential ramifications of a measure like this will not be easy to see at the outset, but they are there and they are bad. Here's an example; while it would probably never reach the level of McCarthyism, ask yourself how easy it is to levy accusations against someone — then do a little research into the cases where the Lautenberg Amendment went awry. Finally, look and see how many people have ever successfully had their name removed from the terror watch list.  Think that's an exaggeration?

Once you're on the list there is no clear  way to appeal the decision or remove your name, and that's whether you're a US citizen or not — though they have provided nearly 200 pages of guidance on how to put you there in the first place.  In 2013 approximately half a million nominations were made to the watch list by various sources. Of the 468,749 submitted, the National Counterterrorism Center rejected approximately 5,000. What recourse do the other 460,000+ people have?

That's a great question.

Read the article linked below. author Chris Hernandez explains why you should.

The article is about an innocent Muslim woman from Malaysia who was put on the no-fly list, not because she had done anything wrong, but because an FBI agent made a minor mistake. It took nine years to fix that mistake. And even then, this Stanford-educated woman still couldn't even get a visa to come back to the US, because she had been on the no-fly list.

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