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DHS official: Obama's terror watch list gun ban makes no sense
// Personal Liberty Digest™
Testifying during a House Oversight Committee hearing, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for International Affairs Alan Bersin told lawmakers that government probably shouldn't use the terror watch list for anything beyond its intended purpose.
President Barack Obama has been calling for using inclusion on the terror watch list to deny gun rights and is likely to enact an executive order doing so in coming weeks.
"People can't get on planes, but those same people who we don't allow to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm and there's nothing that we can do to stop them," Obama said in an interview this month. "That's a law that needs to be changed."
But many congressional Republicans, along with civil liberties advocates have expressed concerns over the plan, noting that people can be placed on the list without due process or even knowing why.
"My concern is there has been a lot of talk recently about using the watch list for purposes other than what they were intended, for instance determining whether or not Americans are able to exercise their rights under the Second Amendment," Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) told Bersin during the recent hearing.
"I believe it would be apples and oranges," Bersin said, to use the terror watch list for anything beyond keeping people with suspected terror ties from traveling by air.
He also noted that "less than 0.1 percent" of people on the list are Americans.
And many Americans who have been placed on the list over the years were placed on it by mistake.
The DHS official's remarks suggest that the Obama administration's push to use the terror watch list to clamp down on gun ownership is part of a multi-step process that ends with the addition of millions of American liberty advocates to the list.
As Bob Livingston recently noted:
Now the Obama (no)Justice Department has created a new domestic terrorism czar and whole department to battle the newest greatest threat — behind nonexistent global warming — to America: the white Christian male gun-owning liberty lover. The new department is the evolution of a Department of a Homeland Security program begun in 2009 targeting liberty-loving Americans. That program morphed into a training program in 2013 that instructed local law enforcement to devote extra scrutiny to Christians who believe the Bible is God's word, Christian "fundamentalists" (whatever those are), Americans who believe the country was founded on godly principles and those who believe the Constitution stands as the law of the land. In training materials, DHS has lumped Christians and Constitutionalists in with a group it calls the sovereign citizen movement, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi skinheads, and identified them as requiring special surveillance by law enforcement.
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