Watch Your Guns, Social Security Recipients

This week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Obama administration is pushing legislation that will prevent some people who receive Social Security benefits from possessing and owning guns if it is determined those particular people are unable to manage their own lives, finances, etc.

Gun laws on the books today prevent gun sales to convicted felons, illegal immigrants and others, but these new proposals attempt to bring Social Security disability recipients into the same aforementioned groups so their rights to own firearms would be in question.

According to the report, federal gun law legislation purports that a person is mentally defective if he or she possesses “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”

So how does President Obama plan to find these “mentally unstable” citizens? Simple. In order to pinpoint these “unstable” people, the Obama Administration proposes utilizing a Department of Veterans Affairs strategy whereby anyone who has been declared to be incompetent to manage his or her financial life and is assigned a fiduciary is reported to the National Instance Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Opposition to this plan explains that lumping financial competence into the parameters of legal gun ownership is foolhardy at best. How could mentally unstable criminals be looked at the same as a Social Security recipient who might not be as sharp with his or her finances? Incredible.

This obvious push by the Obama administration to strengthen gun control laws at all cost will affect millions of seniors in a detrimental way. Just because a person is receiving Social Security benefits does not make that person incompetent to defend himself or herself with a firearm.

Senior citizens collectively are smart, wise and savvy, and Washington will be hearing from them in a huge way if these proposed regulations start to grow legs.

Image courtesy of PersonalDefenseWorld.com