McConnell: I might be open to “serious suggestions” on gun control after I meet with the FBI
All I have are the tweets from CBS right now. I’ll update with the full quote once it’s available.
In the meantime: W-w-w-what?
I assume he’s thinking about limiting gun purchases by people on the terror watch list, which Democrats have been pushing for months. Hillary Clinton reiterated her support for the idea yesterday — as did the Trump campaign. When Bloomberg News e-mailed Corey Lewandowski to ask if Trump still believes what he said in November that “If somebody is on a watch list and an enemy of state and we know it’s an enemy of state, I would keep them away, absolutely,” Lewandowski said yep, as far as he knows. Defending the right of someone under suspicion of terrorism to buy a gun makes as much sense to the average voter, I’d guess, as defending child pornography, but there’s a sound reason for it. The list is enormous and there are no due-process protections governing who lands on it; if the feds make a mistake and add you to it, you may lose your right to buy a gun purely because of bureaucratic error. By one estimate, the number of people who are on the list despite having no known affiliation with terrorism is … close to 300,000. At a minimum, if McConnell’s prepared to defer to the FBI and its watch lists to limit gun-buying, he’d need to insist on procedural reforms to narrow the list to true terror suspects and to guarantee some right of appeal.
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