Thirty-six Democrats plus independents Sen. Angus King and Sen. Bernie Sanders have sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan urging them to bring to the floor of the Senate and House legislation designed to block people on the terrorist watch-list from legally buying firearms in the United States. The legislation—authored by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Republican Rep. Peter King of New York—is Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015:
"Republicans and Democrats alike — should have the opportunity to do their part to keep our country safe by ensuring terrorists cannot obtain firearms and explosives," they wrote in the letter released Tuesday. "By passing the bill we could save American lives and help prevent terrorists from obtaining dangerous weapons." [...]
"There is no reason why suspected terrorists who we consider too dangerous to board airplanes should be able to walk into any gun store in the United States and purchase a firearm or an explosive for the purpose of carrying out a terrorist act," they wrote. "But today, suspected terrorists can legally purchase guns in the United States — and they’re doing so, even while law enforcement may be investigating them or pursuing their arrest or indictment."
As noted earlier at Daily Kos, the Government Accountability Office found in 2010 that more than 2,000 people on the government’s consolidated terrorist watch-list had bought firearms legally.
While stopping “known” terrorists from obtaining firearms is certainly a no-brainer, or should be, there is a problem with the watch-list itself. It’s swollen to 700,000 individuals, some of them placed there on the say-so of people holding grudges and for other spurious reasons. Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux have written:
“Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future,” says Hina Shamsi, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.”
So while the concept of the legislation is more than reasonable, it ought to be coupled with a mandated fix of the watch-list itself before imposing more restrictions on all the people on that list, an unknown number of whom shouldn’t have been put there in first place.