Gauthier wrote:From 2004 to 2014, over 2,000 terror suspects legally purchased guns in the United States"Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law," the Government Accountability Office concluded in 2010. The law prohibits felons, fugitives, drug addicts and domestic abusers from purchasing a firearm in the United States. But people on the FBI's consolidated terrorist watchlist — typically placed there when there is "reasonable suspicion" that they are a known or suspected terrorist — can freely purchase handguns or assault-style rifles.
And, as the GAO found, a number of them do: Between 2004 and 2014, suspected terrorists attempted to purchase guns from American dealers at least 2,233 times. And in 2,043 of those cases — 91 percent of the time — they succeeded. There are about 700,000 people on the watch-list — a point that civil libertarians have made to underscore that many on the list may be family members or acquaintances of people with potential terrorist connections.Lawmakers have tried to stop this from happening. Bills have been introduced in Congress to do just that, going as far back as 2007 at the behest of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) introduced a bill to do that earlier this year. The "Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015" would prevent several hundred gun purchases by suspected terrorists each year, and it includes provisions to let people challenge a denial if they believe they were placed on the watchlist in error.
But these bills have rarely made it out of committee, in part due to vehement opposition from the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress. The NRA objected to earlier versions of the bill, saying they were "aimed primarily at law-abiding American gun owners," that "prohibiting the possession of firearms doesn’t stop criminals from illegally acquiring them," and that the bills were "sponsored by gun control extremists."
So back in 2015, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Peter King- he of the Muslim Inquisition- proposed a bill that would have prevented terror suspects like Omar Mateen from being able to legally purchase guns and included an appeals system for people who thought they were being wrongly barred. However the bill did not pass, which is not hard to figure due to the harsh lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association which argues that a bill like that would only target lawful gun owners as part of a massive gun control agenda. So does this mean according to the NRA, that Omar Mateen is in fact a Second Amendment rights triumph?
Why should that bill not pass.
1. It is likely unconstitutional, Reasonable suspicion is a laughably low standard and only used when a police officer wants to briefly detain you (like a traffic stop and typically for less than 15 minutes).
2. The purpose of the terror watch list is to have a secret list of people who you are investigating, if you can go and figure out if you are being secretly investigated by trying to buy a firearm that is not going to be a very secret list. In fact whomever leaked the shooter was on the list almost certainly broke the law to do so and may have endangered ongoing investigations into people affiliated with the shooter.
3. It would give people the means to challenge the constitutionality of the list or subsets of the list (those Fisa courts and secret warrants for instance), which is only a bad thing if you think this things should exist.
