This is a news article by Maxim Lott at Fox News. It warns that the Obama administration program that banned people veterans who receive help on their finances from owning guns. The CPRC alerted Fox to these cases.
. . . Under current policy, the Department of Veterans Affairs asks veterans who apply for benefits whether they handle their own finances. If they don’t do their own bills, the government considers them “incompetent” to handle their benefits, and their name then goes to the FBI’s “NICS” background check system.
If that happens, the veteran is blocked from buying or owning any guns.
In many cases, those affected say they are of sound mind and are surprised to find themselves blocked from purchasing a firearm.
“It was a total shocker,” Mark Jeffery, an Ohio-based veteran affected by this policy, told Fox News. “The guy who made this determination on me was not a psychologist.”
He appealed and waited more than two years for a final answer, which was settled in his favor just this week. . . .
The VA sent more than 35,000 veterans’ names to the FBI to be blocked from buying or owning guns in 2017 alone, according to a VA document. The document was obtained by a lawyer named Seth Watkins via a Freedom of Information request, and he provided it to Fox News.
“The system is just absurd,” Watkins, who represents several veterans going through appeals, told Fox News.
More than 200,000 veterans have lost their gun rights since 2010, the documents indicate.
“I’m not on the right or the left. There’s just a problem in the mechanics of how this is done,” a Veterans Administration employee told Fox News.
“The problem is, there’s no delineation between the individual who is ready to climb up into a clock tower and start shooting, as opposed to the individual who has a touch of dementia and has lost their checkbook,” the employee said.
The VA employee requested that he and his job title remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by the VA.
Henry Wrobel, 63, a veteran affected by this policy, won his appeal after two years of being on the gun blacklist. . . .
The rest of the piece is available here.
So in essence the VA questionnaire is another 4473: they treat a “yes” answer as a self denial, which, under the Obama era regulation, disqualifies them for firearms ownership. Well done, repubs, for reauthorizing an unConstitutional regulation.