Extree! Extree! Read all abaaahht it!

Douchebag Mayor Wants to "Close the Terror Gap".

With the upcoming McDonald ruling seriously threatening the abusive prohibitions of enclaves like Chicago and NYC, Bloomberg is making a concerted push to get any incremental gun control he can right now. His current favorite toy is a federal-level scheme to add people on the FBI's terrorist watchlist, a secret list of about a million Americans against whom there isn't enough evidence to prosecute (the related but more exclusive No-Fly list--which has "merely" a few thousand names--has included peace activists and Senator Edward Kennedy).

Look. We have tens of thousands of words of gun control laws at the federal level. And most states have thousands more. Millions of people are already "prohibited persons". Guns are divided into a dizzying variety of perplexing categories for different levels of regulation. The retail distribution system has been crushed down into a strictly regulated stream with only a few approved venues of sale (with predictable effects on competition, by the way). All dealer sales are regulated, recorded, and subject to freakin' background checks at the time of every single purchase. Guns are subject to more regulation (well-meaning and otherwise) than any other consumer product I can think of.

And it's still not enough to keep an illiterate junkie from getting a gun.

I'm not going to play the "criminals will always get guns" card. I understand that the goal of gun control is to decrease the overall number of criminals with guns by making it more difficult, not to disarm all criminals. But apart from the fact that real life experience has shown us this strategy doesn't work (most illegal guns are simply bought by somebody with a clean record and passed to the criminal--a strategy that makes anything less than complete gun prohibition completely useless), we're talking about a highly motivated subset criminals preparing to break much bigger laws than a pet gun control scheme. These are not people who will be deterred by the trivial speedbump gun control presents.

Banning sales to those on the terrorist watchlist will accomplish precisely nothing except preventing millions of innocent Americans from exercising a Constitutional civil right without due process or meaningful recourse. And frankly, that's Bloomberg's intent in the first place.