General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsACLU's Most Recent Statement on No Fly No Buy Lists.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/washington-markup/use-error-prone-and-unfair-watchlists-not-way-regulate-guns-americaUPDATE: On June 22nd, the ACLU sent this letter to the Senate opposing Sen. Collins’ (R-Maine) proposed legislation. We had hoped that the Collins Amendment would correct the problems with the earlier Cornyn and Feinstein amendments, but as we describe in the letter, the Collins Amendment would instead cause even more serious problems.
In the wake of the attack on LGBTQ Americans in Orlando, gun control is again at the forefront of the national conversation. It is also the subject of proposed legislation in Congress. We at the ACLU, like many other Americans, are appalled by the Orlando tragedy. We have deep concerns, however, about legislative efforts to regulate the use of guns by relying on our nation’s error-prone and unfair watchlisting system.
That’s why we sent a letter today to the Senate, opposing legislation from Sen. Cornyn (R-Texas), which uses the watchlisting system as a predicate for gun regulation, and also opposing a proposal by Sen. Feinstein (D-Calif.), which does not rely on mere presence on watchlists, but nevertheless raises issues of fundamental fairness.
The letter explained to senators the ACLU’s position on gun control:
We believe that the right to own and use guns is not absolute or free from government regulation since firearms are inherently dangerous instrumentalities and their use, unlike other activities protected by the Bill of Rights, can inflict serious bodily injury or death. Therefore, firearms are subject to reasonable regulation in the interests of public safety, crime prevention, maintaining the peace, environmental protection, and public health. At the same time, regulation of firearms and individual gun ownership or use must be consistent with civil liberties principles, such as due process, equal protection, freedom from unlawful searches, and privacy.
And we explained why we oppose Sen. Cornyn’s legislation, which uses the watchlist system as a starting point for regulating guns. It may sound appealing to regulate firearms by using the government’s blacklisting system for what it calls “known or suspected terrorists,” but we have long experience analyzing the myriad problems with that system, and based on what we know, it needs major overhaul. As we told the senators:
Our nation’s watchlisting system is error-prone and unreliable because it uses vague and overbroad criteria and secret evidence to place individuals on blacklists without a meaningful process to correct government error and clear their names.
That’s why we have argued that if the government chooses to blacklist people, the standards it uses must be appropriately narrow, the information it relies on must be accurate and credible, and its use of watchlists must be consistent with the presumption of innocence and the right to due process. This is not what the government is doing, though. Instead, as we explained to the Senate using the No Fly List as an example:
The government contends that it can place Americans on the No Fly List who have never been charged let alone convicted of a crime, on the basis of prediction that they nevertheless pose a threat (which is undefined) of conduct that the government concedes “may or may not occur.” Criteria like these guarantee a high risk of error and it is imperative that the watchlisting system include due process safeguards—which it does not. In the context of the No Fly List, for example, the government refuses to provide even Americans who know they are on the List with the full reasons for the placement, the basis for those reasons, and a hearing before a neutral decision-maker.
It is unsurprising that a system like this is not just bloated, but applied in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner.
By relying on the broken watchlist system, Sen. Cornyn’s proposal would further entrench it. Sen. Feinstein’s gun control proposal, on the other hand, has moved away from a previous version that expressly relied on watchlisting standards. Her new proposal does not rely on the mere presence of an individual on a watchlist as a basis for denial of a firearm permit. Still, her new proposal uses vague and overbroad criteria and does not contain necessary due process protections. It also includes a new notification requirement that could result in a “watchlist” that is even broader than any that currently exists — so broad that it would include even people long ago cleared of any wrongdoing by law enforcement.
You should read the full letter for yourself. And then we ask you to call your senators to oppose these proposals. Congress can pass effective gun control laws without relying on unfair and discriminatory watchlists or failing to provide meaningful due process.
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scscholar
(2,902 posts)That's sad of them.
tritsofme
(17,405 posts)With all the nuttery around here lately it is hard to tell!
REP
(21,691 posts)scscholar
(2,902 posts)irrationally override their protection of public safety. They put your right to not be searched higher than your right to life!
SickOfTheOnePct
(7,290 posts)
sarisataka
(18,792 posts)Without rights, there is no public safety- unless you view North Korea as a model society
Igel
(35,362 posts)To put rights as the foundation of a free and civil society requires understanding. We don't test understanding, we test facts. Rights are what the government says you have--and, in any event, are not a natural kind of thing by virtue of being human but something that's necessary to achieve social justice as defined yesterday by somebody who says something you agree with for the present.
I love the idea of govenment-provided services as rights. Where, exactly, the funding and the staffing comes from if nobody steps up is a question. Presumably my right to food pre-empts a farmer's right to abstain from growing food. Russian proletariats had a right to food and healthcare. Farmers and doctors who didn't play along were enemies of the state. It's a question of who's going to oppress whom--the person who simply does nothing to satisfy another person's rights or the person who claims a right and demands that the serfs comply.
However, first and foremost we have to have a society. We don't. We have a bunch of antagonistic, warring, resentful mini-societies all saying they matter--and if you try to say that "everybody matters," then it's a problem. Society's being ripped apart, and the result of that is either a dictatorship or a kind of government where everybody really is subservient to the bureaucracy, which is to say, a benevolent dictatorship and groups fight not for the future but for immediate power.
Somehow, culture failed to be passed to the next generation.
greiner3
(5,214 posts)
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)You let LEO take anything they want without a court order, up to and including your home and everything in it.
You let any governmental agency deprive you of your property for any reason at any time, because they announced it was in the name of "public safety" to do so.
And if you try to stop them, good luck finding a lawyer from that Black Site you were sent to for unlimited detention.
NO Due Process.
We say you are a terrorist, you are a terrorist.
You want a No. 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, an Argentinia, or Chile, or Lubyanka, or Guantanamo.
This what you want.
Feel safer now?
scscholar
(2,902 posts)I live in Seattle, and renters here have no privacy rights and our homes can be searched up to once a year without a warrant. It's been great for safety because it forces landlords into fixing safety problems.
During the last search, they discovered the ground wire from my dishwasher wasn't connected when they pulled out my dishwasher partially and were looking under my kitchen sink. Less than a month later, the breaker tripped when the dishwasher flooded due to a clogged drain. If the ground wire wasn't connected, the dishwasher may have shocked me.
REP
(21,691 posts)If your landlord is entering without notice and without consent in nonemergency circumstances, they are breaking the law.
Duckhunter935
(16,974 posts)REP
(21,691 posts)Seriously, if his landlord is pulling that crap, he needs to speak to someone about it.
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)And as noted by others, he must give advance notice or he is breaking and entering.
scscholar
(2,902 posts)It has to either be the city or someone they approve. When they searched my place, it was a city employee with a uniformed cop.
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)Nor do they need a warrant, neither do fire inspections.
LEO is there to protect all parties present.
They do give you notice, please don't try to say otherwise.
scscholar
(2,902 posts)How do you come to that conclusion? A search is a search. I had no choice in the matter.
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)Waste of time.
thesquanderer
(11,995 posts)I'm with the ACLU on this. The unknowable and unfightable and insufficiently controlled terrorist watch list should not be used to create a list of people who can be denied rights. I mean, then why not note away these peoples' rights to assembly and free speech? Right to vote? We can't have a system where anyone's rights can be taken away at any time without due process or recourse.
Guns do need more control, but this is a poor means.
AntiBank
(1,339 posts)
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)under that philosophy, that the safety of the state, the safety they were ordered to keep, was more important than your right to anything.
Heck of a philosophy - "If you see something, say something" - but no one argued that they were safer.
We aren't safer when our own politicians swear allegiance to such action either.
Here's an excerpt of a review of "Stasi
The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police"
REVENGE VERSUS
THE RULE OF LAW
"Worse than the Gestapo." —Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi hunter
Less than a month after German demonstrators began to tear down the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, irate East German citizens stormed the Leipzig district office of the Ministry for State Security (MfS)—the Stasi, as it was more commonly called. Not a shot was fired, and there was no evidence of "street justice" as Stasi officers surrendered meekly and were peacefully led away. The following month, on January 15, hundreds of citizens sacked Stasi headquarters in Berlin. Again there was no bloodshed. The last bit of unfinished business was accomplished on May 31 when the Stasi radioed its agents in West Germany to fold their tents and come home.
...
The people's ire was running equally strong against the regular Stasi informers, the inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs). By 1995, 174,000 had been identified as IMs, or 2.5 percent of the total population between the ages of 18 and 60. Researchers were aghast when they found that about 10,000 IMs, or roughly 6 percent of the total, had not yet reached the age of 18. Since many records were destroyed, the exact number of IMs probably will never be determined; but 500,000 was cited as a realistic figure. Former Colonel Rainer Wiegand, who served in the Stasi counterintelligence directorate, estimated that the figure could go as high as 2 million, if occasional stool pigeons were included.
"The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people," according to Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna, Austria, who has been hunting Nazi criminals for half a century. "The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million." One might add that the Nazi terror lasted only twelve years, whereas the Stasi had four decades in which to perfect its machinery of oppression, espionage, and international terrorism and subversion.
To ensure that the people would become and remain submissive, East German communist leaders saturated their realm with more spies than had any other totalitarian government in recent history. The Soviet Union's KGB employed about 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million, which means there was one agent per 5,830 citizens. Using Wiesenthal's figures for the Nazi Gestapo, there was one officer for 2,000 people. The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/koehler-stasi.html
The knee-jerk response is that we are different. I submit we are one election away from moving further down that road than we ever thought.
I think. Because we have already gone down the path a little too far.
hardluck
(641 posts)Seeing as we are bartering on which bill of rights provisions we are keeping and getting rid of, how about a compromise. We add due process protections to those on the watch lists pursuant to the 5th amendment but we take away the 3rd amendment protections from those on the watch list? Then we can quarter soldiers in at their houses to keep an eye on them.
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)I think they knew what they were about, after all, they put their very lives on the line for an idea.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)Some think life is safer in a authoritarian dominated government but the truth is that then the government can be arbitrary and only put those on the "lists" that they don't like. Apparently you forget that the "lists" used by Bush/Cheney were not for safety as much as to punish those that they didn't like. Freedom and liberty are hard work, if you want easy, look to fascism.
cheapdate
(3,811 posts)It would be fair and reasonable to conclude from your post that you have practically no limit on the rights and freedoms you would trade for safety. That's sad.
REP
(21,691 posts)The people who are most likely to end up on the no-fly list are usually less white and Christian than the average German American and as long as it protects the Fatherland Homeland, what's the rights of a few questionable üntermenschen?
Dustlawyer
(10,497 posts)I am a middle aged white man, clean criminal record, attorney, and I have a very common name. I have been on the "No Fly" list since at least December of 2001, when I had two plainclothes police officers point their guns at me in an airport terminal in front of approximately 5,000 people!
I had to have my own assigned FBI agent out of Bush Intercontenental airport. He was supposed to help me be able to fly without getting the "works!" That S.O.B. Never answered his phone one time. I went from flying over 100,000 miles a year to zero because it is quicker if the drive is 600 miles or less, and a whole lot less hassle.
When I called the FAA and the FBI to ask about purging the list they blamed each other. Finally, a supervisor with the FAA in D.C. asked me if I was calling from the airport. I told her they had used the red velvet ropes to box me in a small square in the middle of the damn airport with a cop standing right beside me while people walked by and stared. I had already been there for 2 freakin hours by that point. She told me to go to a bookstore in the airport when they let me go and look in that months issue in the New Yorker magazine and turn to page 76 or some number close to that. The story was about all the people that had the misfortune to have my name. Even a 75 year old black grandmother from Georgia with a similar spelling received the same treatment that I received every time she would fly to see her grandkids.
Cops have automatic probable cause just because my license will pull me up on their stupid, outdated piece of crap they call a list! I have less Right's than you and they want one more. When does it stop? This story above told you how we cannot get off the list and almost all of us don't deserve to be on it. This is ok with you in America?
I went and got a concealed carry permit because they said they would do something like this last Christmas. I didn't do it because I wanted a gun, I still don't own one, I did it so I could have one more piece of evidence that I am not a terrorist from South Yeman who once used my name as an alias. At l least that's what my FBI agent told me that he wasn't supposed to tell me. It's all bullshit, it's so they can have an excuse to spy on me. They can put any name on there and instantly everyone in the world with that name is on the list!
I think we need to ban the sale of assault weapons and do a buyback of them right before Christmas when a lot of these owners will need Christmas cash! We need to regulate it in a lot of ways with licensing and minimum age requirements, storage requirements, mandatory training and recertification. We need to restrict who can own one, but we need to do it with more than just a name!
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)Much as they did with Citizens United.
Sad, indeed.
LWolf
(46,179 posts)Duckhunter935
(16,974 posts)
JackInGreen
(2,975 posts)I suppose I've put most of the voices now throwing the ACLU under the bus on ignore...
jtx
(68 posts)edit to add: tried to fix format glitches.
Here is a link which may be easier to read:
https://www.aclu.org/letter/aclu-letter-urging-senators-vote-no-collins-amendment-4814-hr-2578
RE: Vote “NO” on Collins Amendment No. 4814 on Firearms
Permits, Which Raises Even More Serious Problems than Either
the Cornyn Amendment or Feinstein Amendment
Dear Senator,
The American Civil Liberties Union strongly urges you to vote “NO” on the Collins Amendment No. 4814 on firearms permits, which may be considered on the Senate floor as early as this week as an amendment to H.R. 2578, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies appropriations bill.
The ACLU wrote to you earlier this week, urging opposition to the Cornyn Amendment and Feinstein Amendment on firearm permits, and we appreciate that the Senate voted down both amendments.
We had hoped that the Collins Amendment would correct the problems with the earlier amendments, but instead the Collins Amendment would cause even more serious problems. Our concerns about all of these amendments are informed by our policy on the regulation of firearms, as well as our knowledge of the overbreadth and misuse of watchlists, and are twofold: the use of vague and overbroad criteria and the lack of adequate due process safeguards.
We recognize that enacting new regulations of firearms can raise difficult questions. The ACLU believes that the right to own and use guns is not absolute or free from government regulation, since firearms are inherently dangerous instrumentalities and their use, unlike other activities protected by the Bill of Rights, can inflict serious bodily injury or death. Therefore, firearms are subject to reasonable regulation in the interests of public safety, crime prevention, maintaining the peace, environmental protection, and public health.
We do not oppose regulation of firearms as long as it is reasonably related to these legitimate government interests, and note that public safety interests encompass not only terrorism, but more often other firearm use that results in serious injury or death. At the same time, regulation of firearms and individual gun ownership or use must be consistent with civil liberties principles, such as due process, equal protection, freedom from unlawful searches, and privacy.
The ACLU urges you to oppose the Collins Amendment principally for the
following reasons:
The Collins Amendment Uses the Error Prone and Unfair Watchlist System as a Predicate, Thereby Opening the Door to Arbitrary and Discriminatory Denial of a Firearm
The ACLU strongly urges you to vote against the Collins Amendment because it uses the error prone and unfair watchlist system, along with vague and overbroad terms, as a predicate for a proceeding to deny a firearms permit.
The Collins Amendment relies on both the No Fly List, by codifying its criteria, and the Selectee List, by
direct reference. Relying on these lists would open the door to arbitrary and discriminatory government action.
The Collins Amendment would further entrench a watchlist system that is rife with problems.
As we have long cautioned, our nation’s watchlisting system is error prone and unreliable because it uses vague and overbroad criteria and secret evidence to place individuals on blacklists without a meaningful process to correct government error and clear their names.
The government's internal guidance for watchlists specifies that nominations to the master watchlist need not
be based on “concrete facts,” and it permits placement on the master watchlist based on uncorroborated or even questionably reliable information. The criteria for placement on the No Fly List further exacerbate and illustrate these flaws.
The government contends that it can place on the No Fly List American citizens who have never been charged let alone convicted of a crime, on the basis of a prediction that they nevertheless pose a threat (which is undefined) of future conduct that the government concedes “may or may not occur.”
The overly broad criteria result in a high risk of error, and it is imperative that the watchlisting system include due process safeguards which it does not.
In the context of the No Fly List, for example, the government refuses to provide even Americans who know they are on
the list with the full reasons for the placement, the basis for those reasons, and a hearing before a neutral decision maker.
These are fundamentals of constitutionally required due process.
Publicly available information and the ACLU’s experience with people who know or credibly suspect that they have been watchlisted raises serious concerns that the government applies the watchlists in an arbitrary or discriminatory fashion, particularly against American Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities. An internal August 2013 government document, for example, shows that Dearborn, Michigan home to the country’s largest concentration of Arab Americans was second only to New York City in the number of people on the government’s “known or suspected terrorist” watchlist.
This was despite the fact that, as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan noted at the time, not a single person from Dearborn had ever been prosecuted for terrorism.
Given the extraordinary problems caused by the watchlist system, the Senate should reject any legislation that would rely on it as a predicate, thereby institutionalizing a system that must be reformed or scrapped.
The Collins Amendment Lacks Even the Most Basic Due Process Protections. The Collins Amendment fails to provide basic due process safeguards and instead would entrench a largely one sided and secret process that would not result in meaningful judicial review of executive branch decisions.
We discuss here key concerns, and this is not an exhaustive list.
As a threshold matter, the Collins Amendment strips the federal district courts of jurisdiction to hear claims or challenges, in
cluding constitutional claims. Under our system, federal district courts are best positioned to develop a factual record and hear claims in the first instance.
Instead, the Collins Amendment vests jurisdiction in federal courts of appeal, but only
to hear claims based on a largely secret and one-sided administrative record to which a petitioner would not meaningfully be able to respond.
Although a petitioner may submit information to the appeals court, that information would necessarily be based on guess work because the petitioner does not, under this system, have access to all the reasons for denial, the basis for those reasons, and a meaningful hearing before a neutral decision maker.
These are fundamental requirements of due process. Moreover, unlike the Cornyn Amendment, which at least specified that any judicial proceeding shall be subject to the procedures contained in the Classified Information Procedures Act (“CIPA”), the Collins Amendment does not contain even those safeguards.
To be clear, despite claims from sponsors, the Collins Amendment does not apply CIPA. Although the Collins Amendment does allow a federal appeals court to disclose classified information or a summary of it to a petitioner or counsel, those provisions are undercut by a subsequent provision that allows the attorney general to file an affidavit of objection after which the appeals court “shall” order the information not to be disclosed.
Finally, the Collins Amendment presumes that information is in fact properly classified, or sensitive security information, or otherwise subject to legitimately invoked privileges. Our experience and knowledge of challenges to the No Fly List and other watchlists, and national security litigation more generally, makes clear that no such presumption should be made and these executive branch claims must be subject to appropriate judicial review. The Collins Amendment instructs courts to seal all such records without regard to the First Amendment and common law right of access to judicial records.
The Collins Amendment Effectively Creates a New Watchlist that is Broader than Any
Current List, and then Widely Disseminates the Names of Certain People on It
Finally, the Collins amendment would impose a notification requirement that could result in a
new “watchlist” broader than any that currently exists in fact, so broad that it would include even persons long ago cleared of any wrongdoing by law enforcement.
The amendment would require the attorney general, along with “Federal, State, and local law enforcement,” to be
informed of each application for a firearm by any person who has been on the master watchlist at any point over the past five years even if the person has been cleared of any wrongdoing, the investigation was otherwise closed, or the person was long ago removed from the list.
The Collins Amendment also takes the unprecedented step of informing thousands of federal, state,
and local law enforcement officers that someone who was on the list at some point over the past
five years has applied for a firearm permit, thereby exposing the names of people who are no longer on the list to possible disclosure by any of thousands of law enforcement officers.
While mere presence on a new five year watchlist of people who are or have been on the master watchlist would not, on its own, be sufficient for the attorney general to deny a firearm permit, the creation of such a broad, new watchlist, which could be used for additional purposes, raises
significant concerns.
Thank you for your consideration of our concerns.
choie
(4,111 posts)Actually I'm very anti-gun and even I oppose this legislation... the no fly/watch list is anti Democratic and has been since it was created after September 11th. That Dems are backing this legislation is completely wrong headed and is similar to their voting for the Patriot Act.
Downwinder
(12,869 posts)than the Hollywood blacklist.
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)On a liberal web site.
EDIT: Is the ACLU now an NRAtalkingPoint©?
SickOfTheOnePct
(7,290 posts)Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)
SickOfTheOnePct
(7,290 posts)
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)Duckhunter935
(16,974 posts)Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)Igel
(35,362 posts)Alcohol prohibition. Bad. Yes, alcohol kills. Drunk driving. Alcoholism. Violence. But prohibition is a violation of my rights.
Drug prohibition. Bad. Yes, etc., etc. But prohibition is a violation of my rights.
Gun prohibition. Good. Because guns kill. They foster violence. But if you prohibit guns, no skin off my nose. Rights I don't use aren't worthy of being called rights.
Yup. Due process and equal protection are also rights a lot of people don't use, and really would rather have them vanish. Until they needed them. We live in a time of burgeoning narcissism.
TheKentuckian
(25,029 posts)Where did the disdain for due process and the Bill of Rights come from?
This trend is disturbing, we are citizens not subjects.
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)The solution?
"Sell more guns!"
NutmegYankee
(16,201 posts)People can completely support civil rights and liberties without being pro-gun. There are tons of anti-gun DUers who are concerned about Due Process and the 5th Amendment and the watch lists.
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)We can trot out all our 'high-minded principles" and "idealism" - works well until your knee deep in blood or dead.
Let's ask the thousands of victims about the "nonsense" of doing nothing.
NutmegYankee
(16,201 posts)But any attempt to protect what makes American Citizenship so precious means a pile of blood? Absolute nonsense.
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)have a Constitutional right to buy guns, because they don't have a Constitutional right to fly.
This is your argument.
And it would be "nonsensical" to deprive them of this right to buy guns. 
TeddyR
(2,493 posts)Of "known" or suspected terrorists is completely accurate? If someone is "suspected" of doing something are we going to take away their constitutionally-protected rights? During WWII the Japanese were suspected of being enemies of the state and were interned. Would you support internment for everyone on the no-fly list? This is no different that GITMO, and people on here bitch and complain about the fact that we have interned individuals in GITMO without a trial.
The hypocrisy on this issue is simply mind-boggling.
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)The measure, proposed as an amendment to a spending bill funding the Justice Department, would allow individuals denied firearms to appeal in court. It would also mandate notification of law enforcement if someone who was on broader terrorism watch lists within the past five years tries to buy a gun.
Orlando shooter Omar Mateen had been on a watch list in 2013 and 2014 but was taken off when the FBI closed its investigation of him. He legally purchased a semi-automatic rifle and pistol before launching the killing spree at Pulse nightclub that left 49 dead and 53 others injured.
Under Collins’ amendment, federal authorities would have had to have been notified of the purchases, giving them an opportunity to surveil him and possibly prevent his tragic scheme.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/senate-gun-compromise-survives-first-test-vote-but-future-is-unclear/ar-AAhxIP7?li=BBnb7Kz
TeddyR
(2,493 posts)I thought you were defending the proposal to bar firearm purchases for people on the list without any due process.
John Poet
(2,510 posts)He was on the list.... got kept off a plane at the Boston airport.
I was convinced it was some kind of Bush payback for his opposition to the Iraq war. I'm sure they thought it was pretty funny.
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)When "our team" does it...crickets.
The hypocrisy exhibited by so many here is absolutely stunning.
Democrats want their congressman to vote for a bill that is blatantly unconstitutional.
Sickening to see.
X_Digger
(18,585 posts)When shrub impinges on the first amendment, it's a travesty.
When a (D) politician proposes 'hate speech' laws, it's peachy keen, and about time.
Fucking hypocrites, one and all.
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)They cannot see that they are advocating for the exact same thing Donald Fucking Trump advocates for, people being treated as guilty by the government with no proof given.
IronLionZion
(45,547 posts)After a plane attack, they passed laws restricting access to planes. There were all types of laws around security in various areas. There is no constitutional right to fly in planes.
But after many high profile gun attacks we still don't have sensible regulation of access to guns. It exposes the difficulty of predicting who is going to commit mass murder.
sarisataka
(18,792 posts)Bought and paid for NRA shills
baldguy
(36,649 posts)Nor does it compel the law to allow literally insane statutes giving bloodthirsty killers access to weapons of war.
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)
NutmegYankee
(16,201 posts)I remember when that phrase was all the rage on Free Republic... And we openly mocked the Freepers for spouting it. 9/11 9/11 Terror Terror Terror and God Bless America.
My how DU has changed in these last 8 years. Where did the integrity go?
TeddyR
(2,493 posts)Has identified the individuals that it believes are responsible for the vast majority of gang-related murders in that city. I say lock those fuckers up - doesn't matter if we can actually prove they are guilty, and some probably aren't. But they made the list of suspected murderers so put them away. I assume you agree based on your post.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)80% reduction in gun violence just. like. that.
LongtimeAZDem
(4,494 posts)We know they're guilty; lock 'em up.
baldguy
(36,649 posts)Sorry, not even close. Thanks for the fascist RW NRA talking point, though.
TeddyR
(2,493 posts)Is now a "RW talking point"? Who knew that DU "progressives" would so quickly abandon the Constitution.
UnFettered
(79 posts)I agree with the ACLU on this. The problem with some of the proposed legislation has implications past the topic at hand of gun control. Taking away due process rights and secret government list of citizens goes ageist everything our country stands and has stood for.
I would happily support meaningful gun control legislation, but just passing something to say "we did something" and pat yourself on the back is just as bad as nothing at all.
IronLionZion
(45,547 posts)and this gun legislation helps expose the issues with the list. So, the NRA's absurd blocking of gun control should inadvertently influence reforms to the no fly list and provide a way for people to find out if they are on it and a process to get off the list.
One quick way to find out if you're on the list is to go to a gun store and have them run the check. Supposedly airlines don't check before selling you a ticket, so people only find out when they get to the security screening at the airport and they are publicly detained and miss their flight. There are ways to get taken off the list by contacting TSA and going through the background investigations. This whole debacle should encourage more transparency and improvements to the process.
If people are still being added to the list by mistake (which was a big problem when it started) then this issue will force them to acknowledge the issues and try to fix it. The type of people who purchase guns and the type of people who fly do have some overlap.
bluestateguy
(44,173 posts)And think about a President Trump with full control over that list.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)putting on a "Peanuts" Christmas special as it was written?
Democat
(11,617 posts)There was a time when DU felt the same.
LongtimeAZDem
(4,494 posts)and I've been frankly astounded by the disregard for civil liberties shown here. 
dickthegrouch
(3,184 posts)If the ACLU can't get its act together and provide a reasonable set of rules with 200+ years of experience to draw on, what chance do the rest of us have?
But my real problem is that they waited until votes were being held to complain. That's just STUPID.
How much longer are we going to have to suffer the terrorism of the gun nuts?
I am terrorized just like a lot of other people.
Gun rights DO NOT trump my right to LIFE, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's not even an amendment!!!!!!!
Our right to LIFE trumps your 2nd amendment EVERY TIME.
