A lot of veterans make use of services through the Veterans Administration. A lot who have other options don’t, of course, but many others do. After all, it’s there, and it’s supposed to help veterans.

Granted, the scandals surrounding the VA are legion, and most of us already know about the legendary wait times for treatment and so on. Hell, I still remember a Democrat during the healthcare debates saying single-payer would be like the VA as if it were a good thing. Clearly, he never had to wait weeks for an appointment that should have taken a day or two at most.

Anyway, it seems a recent change in the rules has the VA submitting information to the FBI for inclusion on the NICS check.

This presents something of a problem, and Gun Owners of America has kicked off a petition to try to kill the rule.

Twenty-One Congressmen Support GOA’s Petition to VA for Rulemaking

Springfield, VA – Gun Owners of America (GOA) Director of Federal Affairs Aidan Johnston released the following statement:

“Yesterday, 21 Members of Congress led by Representative Andy Biggs wrote a letter to the President urging him to take action to eliminate the VA Fiduciary Rule, which has arbitrarily disarmed over 250,000 of our nation’s veterans.”

“After Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation, and the Independence Fund submitted our petition for rulemaking to the Department of Veterans Affairs, we received overwhelming support from public officials.”

“We were grateful to see leaders like Representative Chip Roy and Dr. Phil Roe write their letter to POTUS last week in defense of veterans’ rights.”

“Gun Owners of America is equally thankful for the support expressed by Representative Biggs and his 20 Republican colleagues who urged President Trump to take up our petition for rulemaking.”

“We hope to see the Trump Administration take this first step towards eliminating the VA fiduciary rule, restoring the rights of these veterans post haste, and ending this dark chapter of Second Amendment history.”

The problem is that there are people who are deemed incompetent to handle their VA benefits on their own. This could be for a number of reasons, but the ruling comes in one of two ways.

One way is that a court makes the ruling. This isn’t very different from how most non-veterans would be declared incompetent.

However, another way is that someone within the VA can make the determination on their own. In theory, they need supporting evidence, but for me, the problem is still that some bureaucrat is making a determination about someone else’s civil liberties. Even if there is supporting evidence, it shouldn’t be up to some schmuck in an office to make that determination.

And yet, this “finding” gets reported to the NICS as someone being “adjudicated as mentally defective,” thus ineligible to own a firearm.

Further, it looks like this is really about being financially competent. Now, one might think that if you’re not competent with your finances, you’re not competent to handle anything else, yet there are a plethora of reasons someone might be bad with their benefits money and yet competent enough to be able to make other decisions for themselves. ADHD, for example, is often associated with being bad with money, but that doesn’t make someone incompetent in general.

So yeah, this rule needs to be smacked down and smacked down hard.

If someone is too incompetent to be trusted with their own decision-making–and not just bad with money, but unable to be trusted with anything–then that needs to be left up to a court to determine, not some schmuck working at the VA.