When checking-in for a flight out of Sacramento International, Tom McClintock learned he was a terrorist. More specifically, McClintock learned he was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
Except McClintock harbors no sympathy for the IRA and McClintock has never felt strongly one way or the other about the Queen of England. He hasn’t even visited Ireland, let alone waged a guerrilla insurgency for the independence of the Emerald Isle during the late 1980s.
That’s because McClintock is a mild-mannered Republican congressman from California. But that didn’t matter to the FBI. A common surname and an undiscerning law enforcement database had landed McClintock, then a state representative, on the no-fly list.
Despite being an elected official, it took months for McClintock to clear his name, and that’s why McClintock bristled at the idea of prohibiting anyone on the no-fly list from buying a gun. “If your fundamental constitutional rights can be withdrawn at a bureaucrat’s whim,” McClintock warned me when we first met, and I reported for the Daily Signal, “then the Bill of Rights means nothing.”
That was a year-and-a-half ago after the Pulse Night Club shooting when Democrats were demanding a vote on what they called “no-fly, no-buy” gun control. They had debates. They staged a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives. The measure never went anywhere.
After the Parkland, Fla., school shooting though, a bipartisan group of senators have revived that proposal. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., led a coalition of nine of their colleagues last week to introduce the “Terrorist Firearms Prevention Act.”
“Terrorists shouldn’t have access to guns, and this legislation has the teeth to make sure they don’t,” said one of the more surprising co-sponsors, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. Flake, better known for being anti-Trump not anti-gun, insists that the Collins-Heitkamp bill has “robust due process protections” and described the measure as “a logical step that is long overdue.”
And that sounds like a common-sense step at first glance. Anyone too dangerous to fly in an airplane probably shouldn’t be trusted with a gun. But what if what happened to McClintock happens to an average and innocent Joe, someone without the knowledge and resources of an elected official? That’s not immediately clear, because the no-fly list is shrouded in secrecy.
The FBI won’t disclose details for fear of jeopardizing counterterrorism investigations. But what is known is that the FBI Terrorist Screening Center determines whose name lands on the no-fly list and the much larger select-list—two groups that the Collins-Heitkamp bill would prohibit from purchasing a gun.
According to congressional testimony from 2014, the FBI estimates that those lists “currently stands at about 800,000 identities.” Those names aren’t public though, and neither is the selection criteria. There is only one way to find out if your name is in that database: try boarding a plane. McClintock’s description of his experience is more than alarming.
McClintock: “Why am I on the list?”
Official: “We can’t tell you.”
McClintock: “Well what criteria did you use?”
Official: “That is classified.”
McClintock: “How can I get off that list?”
Official: “You can’t.”
That was at the airport. Should the Collins-Heitkamp bill become law, similar episodes would play out at the gun store. Those bipartisan senators think they’ve solved that problem by guaranteeing any U.S. citizen denied a gun purchase “the opportunity to have his or her case heard before a federal district court judge within 14 days.”
Maybe Flake and Collins and Heitkamp are fine with making the exercise of the Bill of Rights subject to a bureaucrat’s algorithm and then perhaps an expensive and projected legal battle. Anyone with a common last name, or an ethnic background that the FBI might find concerning, might not feel the same.
