The mainstream media is—once again—carrying out a nakedly partisan attack on the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the National Rifle Association. This time the mainstream “news” organizations are attempting to assert that the NRA is a bunch of radicals that is so “gun crazy” that they even support terrorists buying guns.
The Daily News made that absurd claim earlier in the week, and the network of Dan Rather is doing so today.
Reality, of course, is something quite different.
The National Rifle Association is both a firearms training organization and a civil rights group, and opposes long-running Democrat attempts to abuse utterly arbitrary terror watch lists ripe for abuse as a method for unscrupulous politicians and bureaucrats to “other” American citizens and resident aliens, stripping them of human rights.
Criminals, domestic violence suspects, substance abusers, and the dangerously mentally ill lose their gun rights after being either arrested and tried and convicted in a court of law, or from being examined by mental health professionals and then having their right to own arms suspended in a court of law. They have their civil rights protected throughout thanks to due process.
There is no due process that places people on the terror watch list.
Government employees may arbitrarily place anyone on the terrorist watch list, for any reason, or no reason whatsoever.
Racial profiling and religious profiling are at the heart of the watch lists, as is the Orwellian practice of putting in people who exhibit “wrongthink,” which ensnared me in January of 2013.
More than 300,000 people on the watch lists have no known association with terrorist groups. Some are merely relatives, co-workers, or neighbors of people under investigation.
Your neighbor Phil is an honorably discharged soldier, an active duty police officer, and an Oathkeeper? Your cousin Rachel is a “community organizer” and “equality advocate?” You’ve made your political views known by liking or sharing memes on social media?
Congratulations! You’re qualified for the terror watch list for these non-crimes, and may be part of the largest single group on the terror watch list, which are those with no known ties to terrorism.
A real liberal media would be blasting the utterly arbitrary and capricious nature of the watch lists and the government’s penchant for targeting the innocent, but the simple fact of the matter is that the modern Democrat Party that fills most newsrooms is quite happy that totalitarian government punishes “wrongthink.”
These are the same journalists who have given the Obama Administration a pass for using the FBI and IRS to target political enemies, after all.
Other civil rights groups should be blasting these secret government lists that have exploded under the Obama Administration, but we haven’t heard a peep from most of them.
The National Rifle Association seemingly stands alone not just for your Second Amendment gun rights, but your first Amendment rights to free speech, to free association, and the religion of your choice, your Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches, your Fifth Amendment rights to due process, and your Sixth Amendment right to face your accuser.
Those of you who claim to support equal rights or civil rights or dare describe yourself as a “liberal” without supporting the NRA in this battle are frauds.
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