OPINION:
With his fantasy world caving in on him, President Obama is searching for something, anything, that he can make look like an accomplishment. He wants to make more gun control the great accomplishment of his last year in office, but he knows that more such legislation will be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill.
He imagines that any scheme with “terrorism” written on it will make it something he can sell. Hence, “Terrorist Watch List.” With an executive order, he would prohibit anyone on the list from buying a gun. “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon?” he asked Sunday night.
That seems to make sense, but once examined makes no sense at all. The “terrorist watch list” is a list thrown together from names submitted by various government departments, names of people whom various bureaucrats think might be, should be, could be suspects. No one knows how anyone gets on the list, or why, or how to get off the list. For all anyone knows some of the names could have been taken from an old telephone book.
There are 1.1 million Americans on the list, which is technically called the “Terrorist Screening Database.” Most of the people on it have never had a terrorist thought in their lives. Adding a name doesn’t require a judicial finding of reasonable cause. The so-called “no-fly list” at airports was taken from the “Terrorist Screening Database” and has included such infamous desperados as the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia. Dozens of employees of the Department of Homeland Security have been found by congressional investigators to be on the list. Boarding rights have been denied to a Milwaukee nun, an 18-month-old baby and a Marine trying to fly home from Afghanistan. But the Boston Marathon bombers or the killers in San Bernardino never made the list.
Even The New York Times was once outraged by such sloppiness and malignant incompetence, only last year describing the “Terrorist Watch List” as the product of a “shadowy, self-contradictory world of American terror watch lists, which operate under a veil of secrecy so that it is virtually impossible to pierce it when mistakes are made,” and concluded that “a democratic society premised on due process and open courts cannot tolerate such behavior.” That was then, of course, and now President Obama wants to use the list to deprive another million citizens of rights Mr. Obama and the editors of The New York Times think they shouldn’t have.
The fear of terrorism is real and should not be exploited by a president more interested in implementing his agenda that in finding a coherent strategy to protect the American homeland. The steps he now proposes would have done nothing to prevent the massacre in San Bernardino, and they won’t prevent massacres in the future. His target is the legitimate American owner of a gun. He should adjust his aim, and put the terrorists in his sights.
Instead, he doubles down on his attempt to deprive the innocents of protection. He’s entitled, like everyone else, to his prejudices, but he is not entitled to act on them. A president is expected to be better than that.
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