Like last week's Senate filibuster, news of House Democrats' dramatic sit-in for gun control has some progressives questioning the exact policies Dems are calling for. Specifically: They support a bill limiting access to guns for people on the federal government's terrorism watchlist. But that list is notoriously problematic.

The Intercept:

While sit-in participants are also advocating for expanded background checks and an assault weapons ban, their primary call to action is for a vote on a measure that would ban gun sales to people listed on a federal government watchlist—a move clearly designed more for its political potency than for its effectiveness.

And the government’s consolidated terrorist watchlist is notoriously unreliable. It has ensnared countless innocent Americans, including disabled war veterans and members of Congress. Nearly half of the people on these watch lists were designated as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation,” according to documents obtained by The Intercept in 2014.

Gawker:

The no-fly list is a civil rights disaster by every conceivable standard. It is secret, it disproportionately affects Arab-Americans, it is error-prone, there is no due process or effective recourse for people placed on the list, and it constantly and relentlessly expands. As of 2014, the government had a master watchlist of 680,000 people, forty percent of whom had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This is both an absurdly large number of people to arbitrarily target in gun control legislation, and far, far too few to have any meaningful effect on actual gun ownership, let alone gun violence.

And here's the ACLU, in a letter to senators this month:

As we have long cautioned, our nation’s watchlisting system is error-prone and unreliable because it uses vague and overbroad criteria and secret evidence to place individuals on blacklists without a meaningful process to correct government error and clear their names.The government's internal guidance for watchlists specifies that nominations to the master watchlist need not be based on “concrete facts,” and it permits placement on the master watchlist based on uncorroborated or even questionably reliable information.

Later in that same letter:

Publicly available information and the ACLU’s experience with people who know or credibly suspect that they have been watchlisted raises serious concerns that the government applies the watchlists in an arbitrary or discriminatory fashion, particularly against American Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities. An internal August 2013 government document, for example, shows that Dearborn, Michigan—home to the country’s largest concentration of Arab-Americans—was second only to New York City in the number of people on the government’s “known or suspected terrorist” watchlist. This was despite the fact that, as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan noted at the time, not a single person from Dearborn had ever been prosecuted for terrorism.

(All emphasis mine.)

It's worth noting the NRA also claims to be concerned about people who make the list by mistake. And the watchlist legislation is only one of many gun measures Democrats say they'd like to pass. They're also pushing for expanded background checks and promising this is only the beginning.

But the watchlist bill appears to be the most politically feasible—or, at least, the one designed to make the Republicans look the most extreme for rejecting it. It enjoys popular public support and with the sit-in ongoing it doesn't appear to be going away any time soon. That makes it worth asking: Is this really the policy on which we want Democrats using so much political theater and capital? (UPDATE: The sit-in has now ended.)

Gawker again:

Since the San Bernardino shootings (or even before), an easy, cynical predication has been that the only form of gun control with a realistic shot of being enacted in the near future would be measures that would ban only Muslims from purchasing guns. As is too often the case, Democrats seem determined to prove cynics right.