(GunReports.com) — The Gun Owners of America warns that the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) could impact all Americans, including gun owners, by allowing them to be indefinitely detained without trial, based on simple membership in certain pro-gun groups or because of particular firearm-related activities.
But in addition to its problems with indefinite detention without trial, this year’s NDAA also contains, in the House version, a provision that would allow military psychiatrists and commanders to question large numbers of servicemen about the firearms they own.
This could open the door for the psychiatrists to send the names of active servicemen to the NICS system in West Virginia. If this were to happen, tens of thousands of soldiers could permanently lose their Second Amendment rights, GOA warns.
The issue first came before Congress during last year’s defense authorization bill, which prohibited military commanders from asking servicemen about their private firearms.
This provision was a justifiable response to efforts by the military to register and, in some cases, ban firearms privately owned by servicemen, both on- and off-base.
Now, a suicide-prevention group has argued that, by trimming last year’s law to allow military commanders and psychiatrists to inventory the firearms ownership of persons they “reasonably” suspect could present a problem, this will somehow be the “silver bullet” to suicide prevention.
So legislators have tacked such language onto the House-passed version of the DOD bill. The problem is that this “reasonable” standard is a very low threshold.
Here’s what GOA fears: Under legislation enacted into law in 2008, the military psychiatrist’s opinion, in and of itself, would be enough to send the serviceman’s name to the NICS system and thereby take away his Second Amendment rights. It is possible that, if the information is in a federal database, it could be trolled by the ATF and placed in the NICS system.
Already, more than 150,000 veterans have had their gun rights removed under exactly the same process.
Is it fanciful to assume this would happen with active duty servicemen? Already, it is standard army practice to take away a soldier’s service rifle when a commander suspects he may be a problem.
So, if the conference adopts the new anti-gun language without simultaneously adopting an amendment — offered by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) — to require a court order before banning a soldier from owning guns, GOA is convinced that the bill could create horrible Second Amendment problems.
The bottom line from GOA: Before a serviceman, who has served this country honorably, loses his Second Amendment rights for the rest of his life, he should, at least, have a modicum of due process. He should have his “day in court,” rather than being “adjudicated” solely by a psychiatrist.
