"We trusted you with a gun overseas, but now we're going to strip you of your right to own a gun."
During a phone interview with host Chris Moore on Pittsburgh's Honsberger Live programming, Erich Pratt, of the Gun Owners of America, says federal legislation will in reality take away the second amendment right of gun owners who are veterans and are diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder...
More as we find additional resources on this issue. An equal problem to that of denying a category of citizens a right (by the way which is inalienable from the individual, that is, inseparable from the individual), is that of the federal government intruding into private health matters of an individual.
Where does Congress find the power delegated to them in the Constitution to determine who is either medically, physically or mentally, "fit" or not to own or possess a gun? How about spiritually?
That power isn't to be found in the Constitution.
It isn't a stretch to think that Congress one day in the future might determine that atheists shouldn't possess guns because they have determined surely atheists commit more crimes than Christians.
Gunowners of America site
http://www.gunowners.org
Problems With The New Federal Gun Control (HR 2640 & S 2084)
http://www.gunowners.org/netb.htm
Leahy-Schumer Senate bill 2084 and counterpart HR 2640
http://www.gunowners.org/a102607.htm
Voice Vote
http://noworldsystem.com/category/veterans-disarmament-act/
World Net Daily article find
Gun owners 'get stabbed in back'
'Veterans Disarmament Act on way to president'
Posted: December 23, 2007
WorldNetDaily.com
Congress has given gun owners in America a Christmas gift: a blade in the back, according to officials with Gun Owners of America.
The organization said the plan supported by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and others, and known as the Veterans Disarmament Act by opponents, is being forwarded now to President Bush.
While other gun groups have endorsed H.R. 2640, a comprehensive plan to expand the powers of the Brady Bill gun restriction plan, Gun Owners of America has opposed it vigorously, and described its provisions for banning individuals, especially veterans, from owning guns as unreasonable.
"The core of the bill's problems is section 101(c)(1)(C), which makes you a 'prohibited person' on the basis of a 'medical finding of disability,' so long as a veteran had an 'opportunity' for some sort of 'hearing' before some 'lawful authority' (other than a court)," the organization said in a new criticism of the plan. "Presumably, this 'lawful authority' could even be the psychiatrist himself," the organization said.
"Note that unlike with an accused murderer, the hearing doesn't have to occur. The 'lawful authority' doesn't have to be unbiased. The veteran is not necessarily entitled to an attorney – much less an attorney financed by the government," the group said.
Gun Owners of America earlier launched a campaign encouraging citizens to call their U.S. senators and ask them to oppose the bill that could be described as "disarmament by diagnosis."
The Gun Owners also were joined by other organizations in opposing the proposal, including the Military Order of the Purple Heart, and the American Legion.
"The American Legion, the nation's largest wartime veterans' service organization, strongly opposes specific provisions of H.R. 2640 … that would unilaterally abrogate the rights of certain service-connected disabled veterans to own firearms, a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment," the group said in a newly released statement.
The Schumer scheme would update federal law in the United States concerning the ownership of guns, and restrictions on those who can own firearms. A decades-old law creates a ban on gun ownership for anyone who has been adjudicated to be mentally defective, Eric Pratt, a spokesman for Gun Owners, told WND. It was intended to be used in cases when a person is declared innocent by reason of insanity in criminal cases.
However, the proposed update would allow that "adjudication" to be determined not only by a court but by any competent authority, which could include a Veterans Administration psychologist, any panel of psychologists or a wide range of other possible "competent authorities."
It also would automatically include people on a federal no-gun-ownership limit who have been diagnosed with some behavior-related childhood conditions, and in a provision that is especially objectionable to the Gun Owners organization, any veterans diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder...
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59341
