The terrorist watch list is still a due process disaster, and trying to expand its use is shameful

Alex Pareene is right:

The no-fly list is a civil rights disaster by every conceivable standard. It is secret, it disproportionately affects Arab-Americans, it is error-prone, there is no due process or effective recourse for people placed on the list, and it constantly and relentlessly expands. As of 2014, the government had a master watchlist of 680,000 people, forty percent of whom had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This is both an absurdly large number of people to arbitrarily target in gun control legislation, and far, far too few to have any meaningful effect on actual gun ownership, let alone gun violence.

…Almost any popular and previously debated gun control measure would have made a better symbolic lost cause. Democrats could be staging a sit-in in support of universal background checks* and waiting periods, nationally standard gun licensing and training requirements, and tougher restrictions on where and how guns are sold. All of those, or even any one of those, would have been more defensible both politically and morally. Instead House Democrats are going to the mat for a shitty, racist, useless bill.

I can appreciate the political wisdom behind the choice of this bill as the subject of high-profile political theatrics; I’m sure it’s overwhelmingly popular, and it hits the Republicans on a weakness (refusal to do anything at all about gun violence) and a strength (terrorism) simultaneously. Anyone who cares about the 4th amendment or due process rights should still be disgusted by it.