Like clockwork, people are demanding the State make it harder for everybody to defend themselves. When this happens many gun owners have a habit of turning to two organizations: the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association (NRA). They’re supposedly friends of gun owners but if these are our friends we scarcely need enemies.
Let’s start with the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Mr. Trump has never been a friend to gun owners but he pretended to be one while campaigning and a lot of people bought it. After the shooting in Orlando he decided to talk with the NRA about abolishing due process:
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
Trump never favored gun rights so his stance isn’t surprising. Considering Trump’s history and the absurdity of what he’s proposing you would expect the NRA to tell Trump to go pound sand, right? Wrong:
The National Rifle Association said on Wednesday it stood by its position on terrorism watch lists and access to firearms, saying sales to potential buyers who are on the lists should be delayed while they are investigated by the FBI.
In a statement, the gun lobbying group said it welcomed a meeting with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. It also said protections needed to be put in place to allow people wrongfully put on a terrorism watch list to be removed.
The problem with the terrorist watch lists is that they’re secret lists with secret criteria. Nobody knows whether they’re on one of the lists and nobody knows what the criteria is for being put on the list. What we do know, thanks to leak, is that there are 680,000 names on these lists and more than 40 percent of them aren’t even tied to known terrorist organizations.
The NRA is trying to be the middle ground by claiming people on the lists should have their purchase postponed while the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) harasses investigates them. It also says that additional protections should be implemented to allow people wrongfully put on the lists to get their name removed. Of course, we don’t know what criteria is used to place somebody on the lists so we don’t know what wrongfully listed means. If one of the criteria for appearing on the lists is being a gun owner then everybody who owns a gun isn’t wrongfully on the list.
The fact that the terrorist watch lists eliminate due process should automatically mean zero punishment whatsoever befalls anybody whose name appears on any of the lists. Since the lists eliminate due process the NRA shouldn’t even give them the time of day or show any willingness to negotiate with people wanting to utilize them. Instead it kowtows like a good serf and begs for a few table scraps. What a fucking joke.
Who needs Michael Bloomberg and his lapdogs when we have “friends” like these selling us down the river?
This is not the first sell-out act by the NRA, but it may be one of the worst.
This certainly isn’t the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last time. However, usually when the NRA sells out gun owners it doesn’t sell out everybody else. By giving legitimacy to these secret lists the NRA is allowing a precedence for the lists to be used to restrict rights (although that precedence was set by the no-fly list, this would more firmly cement it).