Due process? We don't need no steenking due process!

Louis Klarevas is worried--worried that people who might (or might not) be terrorists can buy guns. In his NY Daily News opinion piece, "Crack down on handguns--they're a tool of terror, too," he bleats that handguns are "one of the biggest terrorist threats to ordinary New Yorkers."

Yet America's strategy for keeping firearms out of the hands of terrorists is lax beyond belief. It's so lax, in fact, that today, people on the federal terrorist watch list are not prohibited from purchasing guns. Just think - a person on the watch list can be barred from getting on a plane, but he or she cannot be prevented from buying some weapons.

The gist of his message is that America needs to pass the Lautenberg/King S. 1237/H.R. 2074, which would give the Attorney General the power to arbitrarily bar anyone on the (grotesquely bloated) terrorist watch list (and no, by "grotesquely bloated," I don't mean everyone's favorite occupant of the list, Sen. Ted "Hero of Chappaquiddick" Kennedy) from buying firearms.

I have made no secret of my loathing for this bill (also here, here, and here ). To grant an official (who is not even elected by the people) the power to unilaterally deny an American citizen his Constitutionally guaranteed fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms, without a trial, without an indictment, without even an arrest, is to voluntarily surrender our liberties to the police state.

In making his case for the "danger" posed what by he sees as "inadequate" laws regulating handguns, Klarevas makes the following observation:

But as the Virginia Tech case illustrates, all one needs is an abundant amount of reload ammunition, a densely populated soft target, and the will to kill to produce dozens of deaths in just minutes.

What he neglects to mention is what makes a "soft target"--state mandated victim disarmament. Cho's murderous rampage faced no effective opposition because university policy prohibited his victims the means to resist. Terrorists bent on committing the atrocity of a small-arms massacre (if they choose such an inefficient method of killing in large numbers) will no doubt choose their targets with an eye for similarly helpless victims.

So I guess I do agree after all with Klarevas' assertion that our gun laws make us vulnerable to terrorists, but not in the way he argues. Klarevas claims to be concerned about terrorists with guns, but seems not to be bothered by the idea of the potential victims being disarmed.

We are frequently told that the terrorists "hate us for our freedoms." It seems that some would adopt a strategy of trying to appease them by surrendering those freedoms.

Update: War on Guns has more.