Simply making it onto the No Fly List, or any other of the government’s nebulous array of watch lists, does not mean your constitutional rights can be forfeited. Indeed, more than 1 million people are in the government’s central database of suspected terrorists. Many of them are mistakenly listed. It is abundantly clear that whatever the procedures for putting someone on a terror watch list are, they do not constitute due process. Accordingly, an individual cannot be deprived of their “life, liberty, or property” simply because the government suspects him of being a terrorist.
And the right to own a gun undoubtedly falls somewhere within the definition of “life, liberty, or property.” The Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller found that individual gun ownership is protected by the Constitution; the state may not infringe upon this right. This does not forbid the passage of regulations about which guns can be bought according to what procedures. It does, however, make clear that the right to bear arms is a civil liberty with specific constitutional protection. To take away this liberty from people who find themselves on a watch list would thus be doubly contemptuous of the Constitution.
That this position is eminently unpopular right now is not surprising given the American tendency to cast aside civil liberties in the face of unpleasant circumstances. Graphics and charts that detail a genuinely troubling problem with gun violence in the United States are being circulated with urgency. The sharp tenor of gun-control advocates is at least an intelligible consequence of the American gun-violence epidemic. Yet there is much lost in the uproar. So it goes. In the 1940s, Japanese-Americans simply had to be placed in internment camps. It was a matter of national security. After 9/11, the PATRIOT Act simply had to be passed so that our intelligence community would prevent such attacks in the future. It was a matter of national security. Now, after Orlando, people on the No Fly List simply have to be forbidden from buying guns. And maybe people in general. It is, after all, a matter of national security.
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