SUE UDRY, sue[at]bordc.org, @defenddissent
Executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee & Defending Dissent Foundation, Udry said today: “Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump agreed last night on one clever sound bite: no fly no buy, based on the premise that terrorists should not own guns. But they both have it wrong. The no-fly list is not a list of terrorists, its a government-created blacklist of people with at best a tangential relationship to some unknown suspicious person, place or activity. There is no effective way to challenge being placed on the list, no matter how innocent a person may be. The list should not be used as a basis to deny a person their Second Amendment rights. Our government has a long history of blacklisting people based on race, religion, political beliefs, or country of origin, and the no-fly list is part of that disgraceful history. It doesn’t make us safer, just less free.”
CHIP GIBBONS, chip[at]defendingdissent.org
Gibbons is policy and legislative counsel for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee & Defending Dissent Foundation. He said today: “In 1968, the Supreme Court, over the strenuous objections of civil liberties and civil rights advocates, announced that police stops and frisks of individuals on the street would be held to a lower standard than other searches and seizures. By doing so they helped to sanction a pernicious form of racial profiling, yet even under these lax rules the New York City Police Department could not defend its stop and frisk program, which was rightfully found unconstitutional, not because of, as Trump asserted, a ‘very against police’ judge or, as Clinton claimed, because it is ineffective, but because the level of racism found in stop and frisk was too great to ignore. While this program is intrinsically unacceptable, given the lethal turn many police-citizen encounters take for African-American citizens, no one could seriously propose a program that increases said encounters as a violence reducing measure, unless they did not believe Black Lives Mattered.”
BORDC/DDF is a transpartisan national civil liberties organization working to fulfill the promise of the Bill of Rights for everyone.