Can the Social Security Administration Take Away Your Guns?

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October 15th, 2015

The Obama administration, in its unrelenting march to limit gun ownership, is pushing to ban many Social Security (SS) recipients from owning guns and it’s not the first time the administration has used executive fiat to accomplish this goal.

The Veterans Administration (VA) complied with an earlier executive order by sending a list of veterans who had been declared incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and have been assigned a fiduciary to the database used for gun purchase background checks.  About 177,000 veterans fit these criteria and they are prohibited from owning a gun.

According to the Los Angeles times, if the Social Security Administration (SSA) used the same criteria as the VA over 4 million SS recipients could be banned from owning guns.

Many mental health experts, advocates for the disabled and gun rights activists think this approach uses a broad brush to identify possible dangerous gun owners and threatens our 2nd amendment right to own guns.  Is the inability to handle money or balance a check book grounds to withhold gun ownership?

RetireSafe thinks this use of a government bureaucracy to police and control our basic rights is a continuation of a pattern this administration has used to circumvent the other branches of government to advance its own agenda.  Remember the Obamacare panel, the unelected group of bureaucrats who had the unfettered power to make draconian cuts to Medicare?  Remember the power that was given to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to arbitrarily initiate or eliminate parts of Obamacare which she used to completely eliminate the long term care provision of the law without any Congressional approval?  And just recently the President issued an executive order concerning immigration that is being challenged in the courts as to whether this circumventing of Congress is legal.

Prohibiting someone from their 2nd Amendment rights to own a gun should only be the result of a statute or court order, not due to a list generated by a government agency in response to an executive order.

A bill was submitted to Congress last session and again this session to stop the VA from submitting names to the background check database.  RetireSafe supports that bill and will also support legislation to restrain the Social Security Administration or any government agency from submitting names to this database in the future.  Restricting our constitutional rights by Presidential fiat is not how Americans want, or deserve, to be governed.