Many of the more anti-gun Presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, Chris Christie, Donald Trump (despite his claims to be ‘very strong into the whole thing with Second Amendment’), and John Kasich, have come out in support of legislation depriving anyone on the ‘no fly list’ of their Second Amendment rights. Kasich’s supporters here in Virginia even cast it as the ‘common sense approach’, and one of the chief contributors to TBE’s moderate Republican counterpart defended him, positing that there is due process involved with said list. I hear he has a law degree.
To be blunt, this is rank nonsense. There is NO semblance of due process involved when it comes to the no-fly list. To advocate depriving Americans of a basic, Constitutionally-protected, civil right on the basis of the subjective judgements of unelected bureaucrats is nauseating. I always thought that ‘due process’ involved at least seeing the evidence against you. Apparently, the entire Democratic field, along with the more statist Republican candidates, don’t think so.
Thankfully, the rest of the Republican field rejects this idea. Even national security blanket-hugger Marco Rubio, whose major flaw is his eagerness to please the more hawkish elements of the Republican party by committing the United States to ever more third world conflicts if elected and to trade liberty for security, recognizes what a horrible idea this is. Our new Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, also rejected it.
The no-fly list, includes a huge number of Americans with no apparent ties to any terrorist group of any kind, as indicated by the graph below (H/T: The Intercept):
But hey, it’s for NATIONAL SECURITY. Don’t ask questions, Citizen!
The firestorm over Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslim immigration to the United States (at least temporarily) has put this issue on the back burner the past few days, but make no mistake: It indicates who has respect for the Constitution, and who does not. No candidate who advances this concept deserves conservative support.
