“It’s ridiculous, the notion that somehow the watchlists are a reliable measuring stick for who should be deprived of an ability to purchase weapons,” said Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York and director of its Clear clinic, some of whose clients were wrongly watchlisted…

Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, warned that tying gun purchases to the watchlisting system would entrench a “hysterical” post-9/11 policy.

“We know that there are no meaningful or even at this point knowable ways for determining who’s on a watchlist or should be, and connecting that to gun purchases is only doubling down on a problematic situation to begin with,” said Warren, whose organization also represents people challenging their apparent watchlisting…

CUNY’s Kassem pointed out that those known to have been watchlisted are overwhelmingly Muslim, raising the specter of both a disproportionate impact from an opaque system and gun control advocates effectively sacrificing a politically vulnerable minority group.