Watch List and gun sales

Federal records reviewed by the Government Accountability Office show 800 gun purchases were approved during a recent five-year period even though the purchasers showed up on the FBI's secret Terrorist Watch List. That is worrisome. But it may be unavoidable.

It is reassuring to know the FBI has information about the gun purchases. But the purchases were allowed because there was no legal reason for denial.

Those who bought the guns were not indicted or convicted felons, fugitives from justice, illegal immigrants, unlawful drug users, dishonorably discharged from the armed services, adjudged a violent threat to their families or mentally incompetent, too young to purchase or persons who had renounced U.S. citizenship. Those are legal reasons for denying a gun purchase.

Ninety-eight prospective buyers whose names popped up on the Watch List were refused because they also met one of the legal criteria to deny them a gun. The GAO surveyed records between February 2004 and February 2009.

It is important to know that most people among the 1.2 million names on the Terrorist Watch List are there because in the subjective judgment of some law enforcement official it is "reasonable to suspect" they, or someone with the same name, might be connected to terrorist activities.

As the Justice Department's inspector general has reported more than once, the watch list contains many names put there in error. The selection of politicians, nuns, war heroes and ordinary citizens deemed suspicious by the listers at one time or another is the stuff of modern legend.

The government usually does not know enough about the suspects on the FBI Terrorist Watch List to search or arrest, much less indict them. Nevertheless, the Justice Department in 2007 asked Congress to give the attorney general unfettered discretion to deny a firearms purchase to anyone on the list. A bill to that effect is currently before the House of Representatives.

Among its sponsors is Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who recently voted against giving the attorney general carefully circumscribed discretion to wiretap suspected terrorists without a court order, but thinks it is OK for the attorney general to deny gun purchases as he chooses. Apparently Mr. Rangel is of two minds about the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The carefully hedged terrorist surveillance wiretap law, by the way, has so far survived court challenges.

Gun ownership is an individual constitutional right recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. Denying a constitutional right to a person whose name may have been added to a secret list on the basis of mere suspicion isn't exactly the American way. Nor is it likely to pass judicial scrutiny.