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Senators King & Collins Take First Steps Toward Banning Gun Sales for Everyone in the United States
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal, July 6, 2016
Maine’s two extreme left-leaning, communist Senators, Susan Collins and Angus King Jr. recently teamed up to support legislation that eventually may be used to ban gun sales to virtually everyone in the United States via fiat.
The so-called “no-fly, no buy” legislation - which passed in the Senate as Collins’ amendment to a Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations bill - but failed in the House - sought to prohibit anyone arbitrarily placed on the F.B.I.’s “no-fly” list from purchasing a gun. The problem with the “no-fly” list, however, is that it is riddled with errors and inaccuracies.
The Fort Fairfield Journal contacted both Senator King’s and Collins’ office to ask; “exactly how one gets placed on the ‘no-fly’ list (i.e., which court or judge hears the case to determine said placement) and if they are placed there incorrectly, what are the procedures for correcting, or appealing it?”
Both Senators’ office staffs replied to acknowledge they received the question but ultimately, and predictably, answers were not provided.
The reality of the “no-fly” list is that it is compiled in secret by unelected F.B.I. bureaucrats who do not have to go through the judicial process to convince a judge or jury the person they accuse of being a “terrorist” is in fact a terrorist who should not be allowed to fly. In fact, no judge or court system is involved in compiling the list. Instead, people are simply arbitrarily placed on the list on the whim of a bureaucrat at the F.B.I., in many cases on nothing more than a “hunch.” If legislation like the amendment currently offered by Senator Collins and King were to become law, it would be extremely easy for the Communists who now own and operate the U.S. government to simply declare everyone in the country that does not ascribe to their destructive political ideology to be a “terror threat,” place them on the “no-fly” list and effectively shut down the ability of law-abiding U.S. inhabitants to acquire firearms to defend themselves against criminals both inside and outside of government.
Senator Collins claims the amendment would allow people who are placed on the list erroneously to have recourse to get their names taken off, but fails to realize nothing the U.S. government does to restore a person’s rights is ever as efficient as the programs adopted to take away those rights in the first place. Given the past track record of the F.B.I.’s foot-dragging on removing the names already deemed erroneous on the list, Collins should reconsider her optimistic outlook on government speed and efficiency.
Attorney, John Floyd published an op-ed on his website, johntfloyd.com detailing the inaccuracies of the “no-fly” list. “The GAO has reported that at the end of the Bush administration, there were 47,000 people on the terror watch list. Today, there are nearly 700,000 on the list, far too many to be individually vetting for true accuracy,” Floyd wrote. “The technology website TechDirt reports that 40 percent (or 280,000) of the people on the list have no connection with any recognized terrorist groups.”
However, as Floyd points out, once you’re on the list, it’s nearly impossible to get your name removed. “The FBI maintains a policy that, under certain circumstances, allows any federal agent to ‘nominate’ someone as a terrorist for whom the agency does not have an open investigation. In an investigative report written by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux for the Intercept, Hina Shamsi, of the ACLU’s National Security Project explains that “[I]nstead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future… On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.”
When the FBI wrongly suspects someone of ties to terrorism, Collins believes the government is efficient and honest enough to correct it. “Individuals on the narrower No Fly and Selectee lists would not be allowed to purchase guns,” says Collins' summary of her bill, “but Americans and green card holders would have due process rights to appeal in the Court of Appeals following a proscribed procedure.”
“I think she means ‘a prescribed procedure,’ which would be the procedure laid out in her bill,” said Jacob Sullum at www.reason.com “as opposed to ‘a proscribed procedure,’ which would be a procedure forbidden by her bill. In any case, she offers no details about what this mandated or prohibited procedure would entail. Because of the no-fly list, for example, innocent, law-abiding Americans have found themselves subject to relentless hassles, interrogation and searches every time they try to travel by air. They may share similar names with those who have been placed on suspect lists, or be the victims of random error, malicious discrimination, or mysterious bureaucratic quirks.”
“The lack of recourse for those who find themselves singled out by the no-fly list makes for a truly Kafkaesque situation. Innocent victims are unable to face their accusers - the source of the information that has made them a target - unable to see that information, or the criteria by which it was judged, and have no meaningful way to appeal their status,” said Barry Steinhardt, Director, Technology and Liberty Program, ACLU
The inaccuracies in the “no-fly” list are flagrantly embarrassing, but not surprising when one considers a massive, bloated, out of control police state government with a goal to strip away the rights of its citizens and convert them into slave chattel for the multi-national banks now running the country. There are a voluminous number of children, some as young as 18 months old, on the “no-fly” list, as well as at least two Congressmen and several law enforcement officers and active U.S. duty military servicemen – none of whom are legitimate terrorists. In Senator Collins’ world, all of these people would ultimately be denied the right to purchase firearms for self-defense until they can wend their way through the morass of the federal legal system to prove they are innocent of any pre-crime the F.B.I. believes they might commit in the futre.
Oddly, Omar Matteen, the Orlando nightclub shooter for whom this legislation was hurriedly rushed to vote, was not on the no-fly list. Additionally, Mateen was licensed to carry a firearm in Florida and was working as a security guard for a company that contracts security services to the U.S. government.
Matteen was placed in the nebulous “terrorist screening database” several years ago and investigated for death threats he made in anger, but the F.B.I. found no reasonable evidence he was going to carry out those threats and removed him from that list, which is odd considering how difficult it is for people listed erroneously to get their names removed.
When Senators Collins’ and Kings’ offices were asked by the Fort Fairfield Journal how this legislation would have prohibited Mateen’s shooting rampage, they again refused to comment.
Senator King has been touting the communist controller’s line recently by claiming the “no-fly no-buy” legislation as a “common sense” gun law. However, the last place in the world anyone would expect to find any common sense is in the dome-covered capitol building in the District of Columbia.