Go figure the implications of this piece of news from AP:
The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms...
...In a letter this week to Attorney General Albert Gonzales, NRA executive director Chris Cox said the bill, offered last week by Sen. Frank Lautenberg D-N.J., ''would allow arbitrary denial of Second Amendment rights based on mere 'suspicions' of a terrorist threat.''
This heads-up comes from UT Law Professor Sandy Levinson, writing at Balkinization. He thinks "one can increasingly divide the American political universe into a struggle between 'statist authoritarians' and 'state-suspicious libertarians,' at least with regard to civil liberties. A central tension, though, involves the regulation of firearms.
Consider that many of us who regularly blog on this site believe that suspected terrorists detained by the US are entitled to a panoply of constitutional rights, including (some kind of a) presumption of innocence. Nor, I suspect, would many of us support surveillance by American secret police (whether human or the electronic variety) of everyone "suspected" of terrorist links.
Bottom line: Does the current pressure from the NRA deserve a guffaw? mild hysteria? befuddlement? a massive national conversation? Or all of the above? Would we find that we are all libertarians with regard to self, but statists with regard to everyone else?
