-By Gary Krasner
In the wake of the shootings in San Bernardino CA, CBS News played an interview at 6:45 PM EST, in which President Dumdum expressed dismay over the shooting, and while admitting that we know nothing about the shooting yet, managed to claim that the cause of the shooting was the fault of insufficient safeguards against the wrong people obtaining guns.
President Dumdum then immediately stated that we have a No Fly List in which people on that list are legally able to purchase firearms, and that it must be stopped. It was a total non sequitur, since we don’t know that the San Bernardino shooters were on the No Fly Zone.
Like most liberals who have been making this argument to support more gun control, President Dumdum apparently doesn’t know the reason for a No Fly List, and how it relates to our Constitutional protections.
The No Fly List is not a list of people who are guilty of any crime. Senator Ted Kennedy was on the list, presumably by mistake. The list was intended to be an overly cautious measure to screen out or scrutinize SUSPECTS, who authorities SUSPECT may wish cause the plane to crash.
The exclusions based on the list may ultimately be found unconstitutional, but if you read the fine print in the contract you signed to purchase airline tickets, you will see that you agreed that you have no right to fly on a plane, and that you may be detained if you refuse to comply with intrusive methods to search you––which possibly includes cavity searches.
This list contains approximately 50,000 people. No one knows how they get on the list, and many are on the list erroneously.
And this is the list which Democrats and President Dumdum wants to use as a basis to deny Americans their Second Amendment rights!!
Clearly, no one has a Constitutional right to fly on an airliner. But the last time I checked, only convicted felons can be denied a Second Amendment right to obtain a firearm. Mr. President Dumdum, the No Fly List is NOT a list of convicted felons. Rather, it is one of the most dubious and unreliable list of people whom the government suspects could be a danger to other airline passengers.
On December 1, 2015, Dominic Carter was the substitute host of the Geraldo Rivera radio show. He raised the issue, as President Dumdum had, and wondered if people on the No Fly List should be able to own guns. But as he blabbered on about it, he mentioned the Terrorist Watch List in the same sentence as the No Fly List, adding more confusion to the issue.
Meanwhile, President Dumdum still thinks that the 13 people shot dead, and 30 others injured at Fort Hood in 2009 by Islamist Nidal Hasan was an example of “workplace violence,” and not Islamic Jihadist terrorism.
And now he wants to deny tens of thousands of Americans their Second Amendment rights, based on nothing.
The No Fly List is a list, created and maintained by the United States government’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), of people who are not permitted to board a commercial aircraft for travel in or out of the United States.
The list has also been used to divert aircraft, not flying to or from the U.S, away from U.S. airspace. The number of people on the list rises and falls according to threat and intelligence reporting. As of 2011, the list contained about 10,000 names. In 2012, the list more than doubled in size, to about 21,000 names. In August 2013, a leak revealed that more than 47,000 people were on the list. The list—along with the Secondary Security Screening Selection, which tags would-be passengers for extra inspection—was created after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
The No Fly List is different from the Terrorist Watch List, a much longer list of people said to be suspected of some involvement with terrorism. The Terrorist Watch List contained around 1,000,000 names by March 2009.
The list has been criticized on civil liberties and due process grounds, due in part to the potential for ethnic, religious, economic, political, or racial profiling and discrimination. It has also raised concerns about privacy and government secrecy. Finally, it has been criticized as costly, prone to false positives, and easily defeated.