At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D. Calif.) rejected a proposed amendment to her “assault weapons” ban that would protect U.S. military veterans from having their Second Amendment rights stripped from them.
The reason Feinstein rejected the amendment was because of the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among veterans.
According to Kurt Nimmo, Feinstein “basically said all veterans have PTSD and should have their Second Amendment stripped.”
Feinstein explained her reason for rejecting the amendment:
…this adds an exemption of retired military. As I understand our bill, no issue has arose in this regard during the 10 years the expired ban was effect… and what we did in the other bill was exempt possession by the United States or a department or agency of the United States… that included active military. The problem with expanding this is that you know with the advent of PTSD, which I think is a new phenomenon as a product of the Iraq War, it’s not clear how the seller or transferrer of a firearm covered by this bill would verify that an individual was a member, or a veteran, and that there was no impairment of that individual with respect to having a weapon like this. So you know I would be happy to sit down with you again and see if we could work something out but I think we have to — if you’re going to do this, find a way that veterans who are incapacitated for one reason or another mentally don’t have access to this kind of weapon.
The U.S. government has expressed a distrust of its own military veterans for several years. The Department of Homeland Security has issued reports in the past to law enforcement throughout the country stating that veterans are potential “right wing extremists.”
Last month, it was revealed that the Department of Veterans Affairs has been sending letters to certain veterans informing them that they have had their right to own firearms stripped from them because they have been determined to be mentally “incompetent.”
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