But You Didn't Know

Dec. 11, 2015

Sometimes things become so daffy it’s tempting to simply throw up our hands, look the other way and quit paying attention.

For example, I’ll bet you didn’t know the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has conducted no research on gun violence and its injurious consequences since 1996, despite a consensus that such violence represents a genuine public health threat.

Back then, the National Rifle Association (NRA) accused the CDC of using its research to advocate gun control. A Republican Congressman threatened to strip away funding from various CDC programs, and vague language was inserted into an appropriations bill that implied such research was off limits. The agency simply stopped doing it.

It would seem a majority of our U.S. senators and representatives simply do not want to know if there are root causes of gun violence or solutions to slow it down. Ignorance, they believe, is the better option. That, and making sure they always march with ovine fealty to the drums of their campaign-contributing gun advocate overlords.

You’ve likely heard of our civil forfeiture laws in which property can be seized from wrongdoers if the property was obtained with ill-gotten gains or was used to obtain ill-gotten gains.

I’ll bet you didn’t know in 2014 the federal government seized more property from private citizens than was stolen from private citizens. Or at least the value was; the Washington Post reports the government seized $5 billion worth of property while robbers got away with only $3.5 billion. And that doesn’t even include state and local seizures.

And you might not know that you don’t have to be convicted of a crime to have your property seized. In fact, you don’t even have to be accused of a crime. In a civil forfeiture proceeding, it can be your property being accused of involvement in wrongdoing; you will have to prove it was not. I’m not making this up.

To be fair, the majority of such property forfeitures and subsequent seizures seem perfectly reasonable. White collar criminals who accumulate lots of things while swindling people deserve to have those things seized so their victims can get back at least some of their losses. Similarly, there’s no reason drug lords should be living extravagantly on their blood money.

But there are horror stories aplenty involving seizures that do not appear to be legitimate. The most troubling of them happened after legislation passed by Congress in 1984 allowed local jurisdictions and the feds to start divvying up seized goods, incentivizing more and more seizures. The conflict of interest became so overt even Congress had to initiate some reforms. Still, it’s peculiar that even if you aren’t accused or convicted of a crime, your property can be.

Most of us know there is some kind of “terror watch list” and a “no fly list” of suspected or potential evil-doers we’ve decided merit our attention.

Two years ago President Obama, by Executive Order, instructed them to begin conducting the research again and a special appropriations bill was introduced to fund it; it was immediately blocked in the House.

I’ll bet you didn’t know the terror watch list is reputed to contain a whopping 700,000 names of folks living right here in the U.S. No one knows the number for certain because it’s another of our government’s many secrets, but if it’s anywhere near 700,000, that seems remarkably excessive.

The no-fly list is supposedly much, much shorter and contains the names of people we must consider extremely dangerous since we won’t even let them on a plane. We can assume they are under some kind of surveillance.

I’ll bet you didn’t know it’s perfectly legal for people on both lists to purchase guns. It probably never even occurred to most of us that anyone deemed too dangerous to fly from, let’s say, Traverse City to Chicago, can go out and buy all the guns he or she wants.

Most of us probably believe that reality is absolutely absurd. But not the United States Senate, which recently voted 52-48 against legislation to take gun purchasing rights away from those on the terror watch and no-fly lists. Fifty-one Republicans and one Democrat voted against it and forty-seven Democrats and one Republican voted for it.

The same people now blistering President Obama for his approach to terrorism think it’s perfectly acceptable for someone we won’t allow on an airplane to buy guns.

They had plenty of reasons, too. There are people on those lists who don’t belong there, they said, and we can’t abridge their rights. Or it will alert people who didn’t previously know they are on such a list. So those we consider the greatest threat can legally assemble an arsenal.

All of this is, of course, sheer lunacy. I’ll bet you did know that.