The New York Times’ editorial board supports using the government’s “no fly” list to strip suspected terrorists of their Second Amendment rights, but it wasn’t too long ago that the newspaper argued the “shadowy” terror database posed a serious threat to “basic rights.”
A mass shooting carried out last week by two radicalized Islamic terrorists in San Bernardino, Calif., has renewed efforts in Congress to deprive suspects on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s consolidated terrorist watch list of a their right to bear arms.
President Obama said last week that he supported proposal, explaining shortly after the shooting spree that left 14 dead, “Those same people who we don’t allow to fly can go into a store in the United States and buy a firearm, and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them. That’s a law that needs to be changed.”
However, when the issue was put to a vote last Thursday in the United States Senate, it was voted down by Republican lawmakers who argued that the measure was unconstitutional as it deprived citizens of their rights without due process.
The Times doesn’t see it that way, and the paper accused GOP lawmakers this weekend of being complicit in “arming potential terrorism suspects.”
“Mr. Ryan’s Senate colleagues demonstrated that they are more worried about the possibility that someone might be turned away from a gun shop than shielding the public against violent criminals,” the editorial board said, referring to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
They accused the 2016 Republican presidential candidates of distracting from the subject by using political attacks and “fear.”
But the Times’ editorial board hasn’t always been so willing to accept that people on the federal watch list are in need of monitoring, and possibly deprived of their constitutional rights.
The paper argued as recently as last spring that the Bush-era initiative had run “amok,” telling the story in an April 18, 2014, article of innocent American citizens who had been swept up by a faceless bureaucracy.
“Welcome to the shadowy, selfcontradictory world of American terror watch lists, which operate under a veil of secrecy so thick that it is virtually impossible to pierce it when mistakes are made. A 2007 audit found that more than half of the 71,000 names then on the nofly list were wrongly included,” the editorial board said.
“In a recently unredacted portion of his January ruling, Judge Alsup noted that in 2009 the government added Dr. Ibrahim back to its central terrorist screening database under a ‘secret exception’ to its own standard of proof. This would be laughable if it weren’t such a violation of basic rights. A democratic society premised on due process and open courts cannot tolerate such behavior.”
The Times is not alone in performing an apparent about-face regarding it opposition to the terrorist watch list.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing over the “no fly list,” said this week that only with “major reform” could the database be used to stop gun purchases.
“We don’t have a position on the legislation in question, but … have many criticisms of the overall watchlisting system as it currently operates,” ACLU’s media strategist Josh Bell told BuzzFeed News.
“There is no constitutional bar to reasonable regulation of guns, and the No Fly List could serve as one tool for it, but only with major reform,” ACLU National Security Project director Hina Shamsi said.
(h/t Charles C. W. Cooke)
