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« Bernie Sanders and the Second Amendment | Main | Robert Cottrol on the Black Experience »

Social Security moves to ban certain recipients from owning guns

Posted by David Hardy · 20 July 2015 04:45 PM

The news has been out (and I too busy to blog it) that the VA is moving to report the names of certain pension recipients to NICS, so as to ban them from purchasing firearms -- and in legal effect, from possessing them, as well. The rationale is that those veteran-pensioners who receive payments thru a fiduciary (appointed because the pensioner was found incompetent to handle his or her financial affairs) comes within the GCA 68 ban.

Now, it's reported, the Social Security system is going to do the same for its pensioners who receive payments through a fiduciary.

This would certain curtail the number of mass shootings and drive-by homicides caused by our WWII vets and SSI recipients, except for the fact that it's hard to reduce zero.

To add to the mess, the reasoning must be that these people come within the 18 U.S.C. ยง922(d) ban on a person who has been "adjudicated as a mental defective." That's a term from the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of progressivism ... and of eugenics. Its use appears to have faded out after the Nazis showed their method of dealing with the "mentally defective." Yet here it is in Federal law.

4 Comments | Leave a comment

Harry Schell | July 21, 2015 7:55 AM | Reply

This will not be the last move to disarm citizens for no legitimate reason.

And it has, as you noted, nothing to do with public safety or the safety of the person banned.

It's a precedent, which is why the "mental defective" language is used.

Not a few on the Left believe those who don't buy the climate change silliness are mentally defective.

Anonymous | July 21, 2015 8:51 AM | Reply

Federal law does not, of course, support this proposed action. The word "adjudicated" in 18 USC 922(g)(h) is not irrelevant. To be a "prohibited person" banned from possessing firearms, someone must be "adjudicated" a mental defective, meaning that that person has been so found by a neutral judicial process with all due process. Even more repugnant than the concept of labelling someone a "mental defective"is the idea that some GS-6 bureaucrat can do it unilaterally. So, decisions that can ruin peoples' lives are to be made in secret by anonymous bean-counting minions, subject to little or no oversight, and without remedy for the wronged or accountability for the wrongdoer. The best one could say is that this time at least they're (relatively) honest about it.

Jim D. | July 22, 2015 9:00 AM | Reply

...and I'm sure there will shortly be a law that if you want to actually collect your Social Security benefits, you will have to assign the U.S. government as your "fiduciary", because who else would know best how to spend your money.

SDN | July 23, 2015 8:27 PM | Reply

Actually, Dave, my expectation is the next move will be to say that no one who lives in the same house with all these "prohibited persons" is allowed to own a gun either, because access

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