More slippery slopes

You'd think that the gun banners would bow to the will of the American people when it comes to what they call "reasonable gun regulations" but that's not the case. After all, the American people have spoken with their dollars on guns. We've been buying guns and ammo like crazy since the election.

There's a movement afoot to let the government decide who can buy a gun and who cannot. This isn't being done through the normal deliberative process. No. Senator Frank Lautenberg wants to give the FBI authority to put your name on a No Buy list.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg would like to stop these sales. The New Jersey Democrat has introduced legislation, the "Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2009," to prohibit gun sales to anyone on the FBI's watch list.

It all boils down to giving the FBI the authority to ban anyone who might be suspected of being a terrorist. Not those people who have been convicted of terrorism, not those people who have committed or conspired to commit a crime. No. Just those people who some faceless bureaucrat decides might be a suspected terrorist.

Who might those faceless bureaucrats decide is a potential threat to the security of the United States? Well, lets look at another government report that surfaced last April.

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

So, if I'm opposed to abortion or illegal immigration and Senator Lautenberg gets his way, I might be put on an FBI watch list? Did I mention that I own guns and that I buy guns regularly? Heaven Forfend! I'm a right-wing terrorist!

This is the slippery slope of slippery slopes. No one wants terrorists to have guns, but if all the government has to do is declare all gun owners as potential terrorists, then suddenly we're all in danger of losing an important civil right.

I don't want bureaucrats of any stripe telling me what I can buy or not buy. If they want to restrict guns to certain groups of people, let them do so through the legislative process, not bureaucratic fiat.