Former NSA Director Michael Hayden: Banning Guns ‘Might’ Be Part of Counterterrorism

During a Wall Street Journal Future of Cybersecurity breakfast, former NSA director Michael Hayden suggested banning whole categories of guns “might” need to be part of America’s “counterterrrorism discussion” going forward.

He specifically referenced the June 12 Orlando Pulse terror attack and suggested there “might be some guns out there that nobody should be able to buy.”

Hayden told WSJ that the government has just about bumped into the wall regarding the Fourth Amendment — there “is not much” left that they can do constitutionally. He said, “We could probably do more things that’ll squeeze your privacy a bit, to give us a marginally higher probability that we could have caught the Orlando guy prior to the attack, but not much.” He stressed that security and intelligence are “really playing on the edges” at this point; constitutional limitations prohibit them from doing much more.

Then he transitioned and suggested it may be time to move into areas protected by the Second Amendment. He said, “Rather than jigger in the Fourth Amendment, and try to increase–only marginally–our ability to predict this event, why don’t you take a look at the Second? And why don’t we begin to wonder about making the guy less efficient who actually conducts the event?”

Hayden then went on to suggest we recognize that there are certain people who ought to never be able to own a gun, and that there are certain guns that ought not be owned by anyone.

See how this works? Hayden is suggesting the “counterterrorism discussion” revolve around denying access to certain weapons–say, AR-15s–to anyone because the Orlando terrorist used an AR-15 to kill people. This is an insult to law-abiding citizens who are made suspect in Hayden’s scenario and cannot be trusted with a certain type of gun on the basis that criminals and terrorists cannot be trusted with them.

Here is a novel idea for Hayden: lock up the criminals and deport or imprison the terrorists. It is they who are evil, not the guns that they sometimes use to kill people. As long as they are in our midst,they will find something that can be weaponized and will develop a method to carry out their devious actions. Disarming law-abiding Americans would only make it easier for criminals and terrorists to gain success by weaponizing rudimentary things.

The Ohio State attacker proved that. He attacked a campus where students are disarmed by mandate, thereby allowing him to wreak havoc and instill terror through the use of a car and butcher knife. All of America would be like the Ohio State campus if we were crazy enough to listen to Hayden’s attempt to justify limiting the Second Amendment.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.