Veterans' Gun Rights Restored
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For three decades, the VA was treating a veteran who needed help managing benefit payments the same way the law treats someone a court has declared mentally incompetent. Those are not the same thing — not even close.
At the peak of this policy, veterans accounted for over 98% of all federal mental health records submitted to NICS — not because veterans are mentally ill at that rate, but because the VA was bulk-reporting anyone assigned a fiduciary.
That number stopped me cold. If you'd told me that figure at the gun shop counter, I'd have told you to check your source. But that's what bulk administrative reporting does — it turns a paperwork category into a prohibited persons list. A fiduciary appointment is a financial tool, not a psychiatric diagnosis.
A civilian who needed a money manager to handle their bills? No problem. A combat vet who needed the same help? Prohibited person.
That's the part that should make every shooter's jaw tighten. The guy who never laced up a boot keeps his rights. The guy who spent a year downrange loses them because he needed help with VA paperwork. That's not a mental health policy — that's a trap built into the bureaucracy.
Stripping someone's constitutional rights based on a financial management decision, with zero due process, is not a mental health strategy. It's a bureaucratic shortcut that punished the people who earned those rights the hard way.
The due process angle matters here beyond just veterans' rights. The mechanism that did this damage — no court, no hearing, no judge — is the same type of mechanism that gets proposed in other contexts. If it was wrong here, and it clearly was, that's worth remembering the next time someone pitches a "common sense" administrative solution.
This is a real correction to a real injustice, and the coordination between GOA, Congress, and the new VA Secretary to pull existing names — not just stop adding new ones — is what separates this from a press release.
A quarter-million veterans is not an abstraction. Those are guys at your range, in your club, maybe in your squad at a local match who couldn't pass a background check to buy a hunting rifle.
If you're a veteran or know one who was affected by this — did you even know this was happening, or did you only find out when a NICS check came back denied?
Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett
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