Chicken Liberals

There's been a kerfuffle over an report that:

Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws.

People suspected of being members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this. [Italics mine]

What about these people's right to be presumed innocent? Gun ownership is, after all, a constitutional right as much as due process is. Why are liberal newspapers and senators so eager to "depriv[e] people suspected of terror ties of civil rights on a bureaucrat's say-so," to quote Instapundit?

I don't believe that our guaranteed rights include the right to be anonymous, and our problems with terrorism basically boil down to this silly idea. I am not so paranoid as to think that carrying a national ID card is going to subject me to automatic abuse. We're so far from being "Orwellian" that the liberal/libertarian panic should make us all step back and look at what we're thinking. We need government primarily to assure domestic tranquility, but too many of us seem to fear the people we hire to protect us more than we do the really dangerous people. I own guns, but I don't really want to live in a society where everybody packs a gun to protect him/herself. I would rather have professionals who are trained and practiced in such things do it.