Senators Investigate Why VA Has Stripped 260K Veterans of their Gun Rights

Program disarms veterans without cause

Veterans who are assigned a fiduciary trustee to act on their behalf are automatically declared “mentally defective” and are reported to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check system, making them ineligible to possess firearms under a presidential executive act signed in December, 2015. This is an outrage. The fiduciary trustee assignation simply has to do with the veteran’s ability to manage their finances. It has nothing to do with their ability to manage other affairs, nor their rights that are guaranteed under the constitution. So far, the VA has reported 260,381 veterans to the FBI since the law was implemented last year.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa lawmaker who is currently the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, finds this unacceptable.

“Our military heroes risked their lives to protect and defend this country and all that we stand for, including our most basic constitutional rights,” said Grassley in a statement. “Now the very agency created to serve them is jeopardizing their Second Amendment rights through an erroneous reading of gun regulations. The VA’s careless approach to our veterans’ constitutional rights is disgraceful.”

In an effort to fix the issue, Grassley, along with Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., penned a letter to VA Secretary Robert McDonald last week and another to the subcommittee over the agency’s funding, questioning the practice.

“The use of the VA regulation, adopted for a totally unrelated purpose, is suspect, especially in light of the Supreme Court holding that the Second Amendment is a fundamental right,” reads the letter to McDonald. “That holding changed the legal calculus by which a regulatory scheme can survive constitutional scrutiny and it is not clear how these regulations would fare under that increased scrutiny.”

Demanding answers, the senators want the VA to explain the process which now supplies over 99 percent of the individuals reported as being “mentally defective” to NICS and how they satisfy the constitutional argument.

A similar standard has been proposed by the Social Security Administration to strip gun rights from as many as 75,000 beneficiaries per year according to figures released by the White House in January.

It is historical reality that fascists seek to disarm the public in order to make sure they cannot defend themselves from a tyrannical government. It was done in Nazi Germany, and in Soviet Russia. Leftists will claim this is an exaggeration, and that they do not intend to disarm the entire U.S. population, yet in a few short months they have decided that a huge number of veterans and huge number of social security recipients should both be precluded from a basic constitutional right of self protection because they need help with their financial issues.

How much more obvious can it be than this scheme to take away our means of self protection, all done quietly, behind our backs, and without due process? The question now becomes whether the Left will be able to disarm enough citizens quickly enough to survive the coming revolution that is also brewing in the nation.

Source:guns.com