The Veterans Administration is, at least in theory, supposed to help veterans. That's why it was created, and to be fair, there are a lot of ways in which they more or less succeed in that mission. After all, they administer the VA home loan program and the G.I. Bill.

But they also have a history of unilaterally stripping veterans of their right to keep and bear arms, something they at least should lack the authority to do.

What happened was that those veterans who needed a fiduciary--someone appointed to help them handle their finances--were also reported to the NICS database as being incompetent to own firearms.

No judge determined this, which made it a problem, and Congress has at least put a temporary halt on this practice.

An effort to extend the halt, however, met some resistance recently.

The majority of U.S. House Democrats voted to take the Second Amendment rights away from certain veterans who served in the U.S. Armed Services.

They did so when they overwhelmingly rejected an amendment filed to a U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs funding bill, known as the Crain Amendment.

House Democrats on Wednesday also largely voted against funding the Department of Veterans Affairs when they voted against the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2025. It narrowly passed, largely along party lines, by a vote of 209-197.

The White House said the president would veto the bill for several reasons, including Republican revisions to its LGBTQ policies. But one key measure Democrats overwhelmingly opposed served as a barometer for preserving Second Amendment rights: Section 261 revised through the Crane Amendment.

The amendment, named after its author, U.S. Rep. Eli Crane, R-Arizona, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, was designed to protect veterans’ Second Amendment rights. It clarifies that any veteran who the VA reported to the NICS “was done so incorrectly in violation of their constitutional rights.”

Crane had voiced concerns that VA bureaucrats and Democrats wanted to “create an unauthorized process for dragging veterans before judges for ‘red flag’ disarmament proceedings.”

...

“Because of a horrendous policy initiated by President [Bill] Clinton, more than 250,000 veterans have had their Second Amendment rights revoked. This has been done without any Due Process – no judge or jury – just a mere determination by bureaucrats at the Veterans Administration that veterans must forfeit their guns when a fiduciary is appointed to handle their finances and complex VA benefits,” Erich Pratt, SVP of Gun Owners of America, told The Center Square.

Here's the thing we need to keep in mind: Democrats say they don't want to take gun rights away from law-abiding citizens who represent no threat to the general public, but they sided with this effort that does the exact opposite of what they claim to want. No, that's not surprising to me in the least, but it bears pointing out.

People who need fiduciaries don't represent a particular threat to the public. They're not dangerous and those with similar situations but who aren't veterans getting "helped" by the VA still have their right to keep and bear arms without an issue.

So what gives?

The truth of the matter is that Democrats keep trying to extend the number of people who can be prohibited from lawfully owning a firearm in part because if they do that enough, most Americans will fall into one prohibited category or another. Each one is presented as just a slight extension of what's already on the books, often without any evidence showing that the group in question represents a problem. You might get an anecdote, but the plural of anecdote isn't data.

In this case, they figured out a way to prohibit a lot of potential gun owners--and yeah, a lot of veterans are going to be inclined to be armed--without dealing with the courts.

That's a huge problem here, especially as there are no grounds for there to be any perception of an actual threat.

In the process, though, House Democrats have tipped their hands.