Let’s go back in time to The New York Times’ 2010 article about then-eight-year-old Mikey Hicks. Was he a cub scout or a terrorist? His parents knew. In fact, most people with cognitive function would know that he’s not hell bent on attacking the country, but our government wasn’t sure. He could be the face of absolute evil, so thank goodness the U.S. Senate could bar him from buying a firearm since he’s on one of the many terror watch lists maintained by the FBI. He never had any due process of law concerning his designation as someone who might be the next bin Laden, but who cares—due process is killing us. Am I right, Sen. Manchin?
Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.
After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.
“Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.”
It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening.
Both lists are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are given to the Transportation Security Administration, which in turn sends them to the airlines.
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Should these people lose their right to bear arms? Democrats and the anti-gun Left think so because we just got to do something after the Orlando attack to prevent future mass shootings, even though the shooting at the Pulse nightclub was a likely terrorist attack, no matter how stupid the initiative is regarding addressing national security concerns. In this case, we have Democrats using secretive government lists that lack due process of law to strip citizens of their Second Amendment rights based on mere suspicion. No trial. It’s just a bunch of names that the government selects based off of criteria we really don’t know yet. Oh, and the Orlando killer wasn’t on any of these lists. He was for a brief period during his 2013 and 2014 FBI inquiries, but was later removed when both investigations proved inconclusive of any terror ties or felonious activities.
This latest anti-gun measure just proves that the Left isn’t about increasing safety, or reducing gun violence, it’s all about increasing government power. It’s about restricting ownership for people who probably aren’t terrorists because liberals hate guns, they hate gun owners, and they’re frustrated that they've failed miserably at curbing such rights over the past couple of years.
Now, it’s damn the Constitution if it means fewer guns on the streets because if we didn’t have guns, the terrorists wouldn’t attack us, or something. The Blaze’s Dana Loesch’s stepdad was a victim of his apparently inaccurate list. I think Democrats really need to back off this one because if this passes and things go south (there's a fat chance that this passes at all)—we should hammer them as not only being incompetent when it comes to gun policy, but inept when it comes to public safety. An unhinged cohort that is willing to destroy due process of law because they hate guns. I think we’ll win that battle, so bring it on, folks.
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