Do I need to issue a correction for the last post? That’s what a number of readers seem to think. And I’ve gotten a slew of sputtering emails demanding one.
The question boils down to this. Today’s story in the Times says the law is ambiguous on whether Brady background check materials can be used to investigate whether illegal aliens picked up in the anti-terrorism dragnet had bought guns. Fox Butterfield, the author of the piece, argues that the Justice Department’s decision to bar such use is, at the least, an instance of Ashcroft’s pro-gun-rights bias, at the expense of the war on terrorism.
Glenn Reynolds (a right-leaning weblogger who, as a general matter, I strongly commend to TPM readers) disagrees and says it’s basically black letter law. So the Justice Department’s decision simply enforces existing law. And who can question that?
So who’s right?
I’m not sure. The law I’ve been able to get my hands on seems ambiguous to me. (I’d actually welcome lawyers who’ve got an opinion on the legal question here to weigh in.) And the Times article says that (admittedly unnamed) FBI officials say that the Justice decision represents a change in existing policy – something which on the face of it would seem to make it a little less than a case of black letter law.
So it’s possible I may have been wrong when I took the Ashcroft Justice Department to task for protecting “some fictive right claimed by paranoid gun freaks” since maybe it’s written into the law.
Maybe the real scandal is that “paranoid gun freaks” have sufficient political muscle to get their “fictive rights” written into law?
