I wrote this for Facebook, then decided I might as well make it more accessible by posting it here. What got me thinking about the subject was this blog post by legal scholar Josh Blackman , whose writings I have come to like--including, e.g., his book on the legal challenges to Obamacare . I've been ruminating more on the proposals--by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and others--that if you're on a terrorist watch list or a no-fly list, you should be barred from being able to buy a gun. It's important to keep in mind that placement on such lists is based only on suspicion--by definition, less than needed to constitute "probable cause" for an arrest warrant, let alone evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt" necessary for a criminal conviction. The Adam Winkler proposal to have such determinations rubber-stamped by a FISA-like court (see the link I posted earlier today) doesn't improve matters much, because those are secret proceedings, ...