House Passes Bill Protecting Veterans’ Gun Rights

When people enlist in the military, they swear an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Part of the Constitution is the Second Amendment, which means the men and women who go into harm’s way for this nation do so, in part, to preserve our right to keep and bear arms.

So when I found out that the Department of Veterans Affairs was stripping fellow veterans of their gun rights because they needed financial help, I about lost my damn mind. 

Nothing about that was right, and while there’s an administrative fix in place putting an end to the practice, that can go out the window the moment a new administration moves in.

Which is why this little bit of good news brightened my day.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed legislation that would permanently end the long-standing federal practice of stripping veterans of their right to keep and bear arms simply because they need help managing their Department of Veterans Affairs benefits.

H.R. 1041, the Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, addresses a decades-old VA policy under which veterans assigned a fiduciary to help manage their VA benefits were automatically reported to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System as prohibited persons — losing their right to purchase or possess firearms in the process. The policy applied even when the fiduciary appointment had nothing to do with mental competency related to firearms ownership.

The measure was sponsored by Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

The decades-old problem

The fiduciary-to-prohibited-person pipeline traces back to a 1998 VA policy interpretation that classified veterans requiring fiduciary assistance as “mental defectives” under the federal definition used by NICS. Once a veteran was assigned a fiduciary, the VA was required to report them to the FBI as a prohibited person — adding their name to the same federal database that disqualifies convicted felons and domestic abusers from firearms ownership.

The practical effect was that veterans who simply needed help managing their VA benefits — for reasons that often had nothing to do with mental health or competency for firearms ownership — were stripped of their Second Amendment rights through an administrative process with no judicial review and no due process protections.

By the time the policy came under serious scrutiny, an estimated 257,000 veterans were on the prohibited persons list solely because of fiduciary assignments. Many of these veterans had no underlying mental health adjudication, no court determination of incompetency, and no opportunity to contest the designation before losing their rights.

Now, should the Senate also pass this and President Trump sign it, the VA will no longer be able to unilaterally decide to strip someone of their gun rights based on their ability to manage their finances. If the VA believes someone is a danger, officials can refer the case to the appropriate authorities for a determination in a court of law, not the VA’s internal system.

It never should have happened. No one should have their rights stripped from them without due process, and even then, it needs to be for a handful of circumstances where someone is an actual danger to themselves and others via their incompetence. Many of these vets would never have been found “mentally defective” with regard to their gun rights, especially since a VA fiduciary only has the authority to manage a veteran’s benefits, not their finances as a whole.

Luckily, Congress has a chance to fix this. The Senate needs to vote on this soon, and while I’m sure the usual suspects will be up in arms about this, it’ll really just show the world how they view the men and women who defended this nation, particularly after 9/11.

Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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