Hillary Clinton and others on the Left are linking the fight against terrorism and gun control, suggesting Democrats intend to use the battle against ISIS as a back door to curbing Second Amendment rights.
“I don’t see these two as in any way contradictory,” the Democratic presidential candidate told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “We have to up our game against terrorists abroad and at home, and we have to take account of the fact that our gun laws (allow) the easy access to those guns by people who shouldn’t get them.”
President Obama chimed in Sunday evening during an address to the nation, linking gun control to the ability of terrorists to carry out their attacks.
“We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino,” he said. This even though California has some of the nation’s toughest gun laws and France, where a massacre took place in Paris last month, makes it exceedingly difficult to obtain and keep a gun .
The New York Times weighed in on Friday with a front page editorial, its first in nearly a century, calling for stricter gun laws in the wake of the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attacks.
President Obama and fellow Democrats are calling for the 700,000 individuals on the no-fly list — many on it for no reason at all — to lose their Second Amendment rights and be banned from obtaining firearms in the U.S.
“Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun,” Obama said Sunday evening. “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security.”
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Judging by their mixed responses, Republican presidential contenders were caught off guard by the push, highlighting the delicacy of debate over how national security and gun control should be balanced.
Establishment candidates Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush fought back by seeking to undermine the credibility of no-fly lists, pointing out that many people on such lists have achieved that status erroneously.
“These are everyday Americans that have nothing to with terrorism,” Rubio told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “They wind up on the no-fly list. There’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion.”
“This is not a list that you can be certain of,” Bush said on ABC’s “This Week.”
The rate of false positives for individuals on no-fly lists is said to be as high as 40 percent.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, also speaking on CNN, said such a rule would alert potential terrorists that they were being monitored by authorities, potentially undermining the usefulness of no-fly lists.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who surged to 36 percent in a new poll over the weekend, was noncommittal.
“I’m very strong into the whole thing with Second Amendment — but if you can’t fly, and if you’ve got some really bad — I would certainly look at that very hard,” he told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders suggested gun manufacturers should be criminally prosecuted if their weapons fall into the wrong hands.
But Clinton blasted the Republican criticisms of the no-fly list and suggested a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to gun control.
“I’m a lot happier having a list that keeps people off planes (if) there’s any question about their intent or their potential behavior,” she said. “So … I can’t take anybody seriously who’s going to begin to chip away at the no-fly list.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running to Hillary’s left for the Democratic Party nomination, went even further by suggesting that gun manufacturers should be criminally prosecuted if their weapons fall into the wrong hands.
“If a gun manufacturer understands and knows that the product he is selling to a community is really getting out to criminal elements, that manufacturer should be held liable for what the company is doing,” he told “Face the Nation.”
Rubio summed up conservative fears that liberals are using the terrorist attacks and the no-fly list issue as a proxy to strip law-abiding Americans of their right to self defense.
“If these were perfect lists, that would be one thing,” he said. “But there are over 700,000 Americans on some watch list or another that would all be captured under this amendment the Democrats offered. And that’s the problem.“
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