The NRA Finally Notices

Will the ACLU and the NRA finally find common cause? The issue is that in the general free-for-all shredding of constitutional rights by our government, the NRA has picked up in particular the threat posed by Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s (NJ) proposed legislation, the “Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2007” (S.1237). The NRA, in a Wayne LaPierre opinion piece in the July 2007 “American Hunter”, says that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and the Department of Justice are supporting this bill, which would give the AG’s office the power, via suspicion alone, to permanently deprive a citizen of firearms and ammunition, and on top of that, the AG’s office could refuse to divulge any and all reasons for doing so under the blanket justification of “national security”.

The Bush administration is on record affirming the Second Amendment as an individual right, yet this bill trashes the Constitution, mocking the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. It would arbitrarily take away your rights — without charges, without an arrest, without a trial and without a conviction — just because the attorney general says so. It denies citizens all due process of law at the sole discretion of government — something that must never happen in America.

Bad news, Wayne. You are behind the times. This has already happened in America, and you didn’t even notice. AG Gonzalez hasn’t “thought about” habeus corpus, citizens are already denied due process rights in their person, and by any measure you care to make, I think it is inevitable to concede that the terrorists won the war on terror. The NRA was irrelevant to the process of wholesale erosion of our freedoms precisely because it didn’t notice what was going on beyond the particular personal property protection of the 2nd amendment for firearms.

Good luck stopping S.1237, though; dumping a sandbag or two where the levee used to be may not materially help things, but at least it would be doing something.