The Biden administration continues to find ways to break faith with America’s veterans. Beyond the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the unanswered questions left after 13 U.S. service members were killed in a suicide bombing in the final stages of evacuations from Kabul, Afghanistan, White House officials are robbing veterans of the rights they fought to protect.
The Biden administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs has been quietly adding names of veterans who require financial supervision – or a fiduciary – to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database as prohibited individuals. This underhanded move might satisfy gun control supporters but is a blatant breach of trust with the very individuals who swore oaths – up to and including their lives – to defend the U.S. Constitution that protects the rights of Americans.
Bureaucrats at the Department of Veterans Affairs are using a little-known rule to skip any judicial proceedings and are doing this without fanfare. The decision to unilaterally wipe away civil liberties has been delegated to unaccountable government employees.
Congressional Action
This is a brazen abuse of bureaucratic authority that must end. American citizens’ Second Amendment rights are protected and can only be stripped for specific instances, including:
- convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
- who is a fugitive from justice;
- who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 802);
- who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
- who is an illegal alien;
- who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
- who has renounced his or her United States citizenship;
- who is subject to a court order restraining the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner; or
- who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
Veterans, though, are facing a bureaucratic nightmare. Those veterans needing financial supervision are losing their Second Amendment rights without a court hearing. Several in Congress are fighting back.
Chairman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) introduced H.R. 705, the Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act, earlier this year. That bill specifically bars the Department of Veterans Affairs from transmitting veterans’ names to FBI NICS solely for the reason that the veteran has been appointed a fiduciary to assist in managing their financial details.
The legislation was described in a July hearing as ensuring “… that veterans are afforded the same due process that every other American receives before any action is taken that would deprive them of one of the constitutional rights that they fought to protect.”
“For far too long the men and women who have fought to protect every Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms have wrongfully been discriminated against. This Congress, that ends,” said Chairman Bost when he introduced the legislation. “Today I am reintroducing the Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act, legislation to ensure that veterans are given the same due process rights as every other American. No VA bureaucrat should have the ability to instantly strip a veteran of their 2nd Amendment rights simply because they use a fiduciary to help them manage their benefits.”
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