Fairfax, VA -(AmmoLand.com)- As the L.A. Times reported, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is currently developing a program to strip the Second Amendment Rights of over four million Americans currently receiving SSA benefits through a “representative payee.”
Not only would this amount to the largest gun grab in American history, but according to the published report, would take place without any due process protections for recipients, amounting to a nullification of Second Amendment rights for millions of Americans who don’t pose a threat to themselves or anyone else.
This new program appears to have been instigated by the SSA in response to a memorandum issued by Obama in January of 2013 which directed all federal agency executives to “improve the availability of records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).” This memorandum required all agency heads to submit to the Department of Justice (DOJ) a plan for “sharing all relevant Federal records” for submission to the NICS.
Evidently, Obama’s SSA bureaucrats read “all relevant Federal records” to mean all Social Security recipients who have a “representative payee” assigned to their accounts to help them manage their payments and receipts. Obviously, many individuals swept up in this egregious case of bureaucratic over-reach would not otherwise be prohibited from owning, possessing, or acquiring firearms under federal law.
The federal prohibitions against acquiring or possessing firearms apply to those “adjudicated as a mental defective,” among others. The term “adjudication,” however, refers to a determination made after a judicial-type process that includes various due process protections. In no case does the federal law describe or contemplate the type of prohibition by bureaucratic fiat exercised by the SSA in developing its guidelines for those with “representative payees” assigned to their accounts.
But SSA is not alone in this directive. The memorandum names several agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Transportation, and “such other agencies or offices as the Chair may designate.” Potentially, bureaucrats in all these agencies could be working hard to identify and forward “all relevant Federal records,” to the NICS pursuant to the Obama mandate.
In total, this program could easily grow to include many more millions of Americans who have any connection to the Federal government through the various agencies named in the memorandum.
Unfortunately, this fits a pattern of abuse within the Obama Administration which is clearly hell-bent on destroying the Second Amendment in any way possible. As we reported previously (here and here), the Veterans Administration (VA) has already implemented a similar program to designate veterans as “prohibited persons” when they have a fiduciary assigned to administer their VA benefits. Like the SSA program described above, the VA procedures are also devoid of significant due process protections or any requirement that the beneficiary be found a danger to self or others. According to the L.A Times article, 177,000 vets have been swept into NICS with the bureaucratic short-cut.
The implications of this policy are too far reaching to fathom at present. Social Security is one of the more prolific and relied upon Federal programs in American history. That Obama’s directive could so easily be implemented within the SSA suggests that bureaucrats could effectively cloak such a program in any agency within the growing leviathan that is the federal government.
Please call or write your members of congress and demand that Obama’s attempts to implement the largest gun grab in American history be stopped in its tracks. You can contact your U.S. Senators and Representatives at 202-225-3121.
You can write your lawmakers by using our “Write Your Representatives” tool.
About the NRA-ILA
Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
For more information, please visit: www.nra.org. Be sure to follow the NRA on Facebook at NRA on Facebook and Twitter @NRA.
You may not find this relevant, but look at smoking. A legal activity where fiats are enforced on smokers without due process or public input. I warned then that if you allowed government to get away with doing that, they would keep on doing it to other things. The genie is out of the bottle folks. Stand up now or be trod over. Your Orwellian nightmare is taking shape and soon everything you do will need to be approved by some agency who can think for you.
Did it take the Replublicans over 6 years to realize that ? F+&k no it didn’t,…just silence ! Even now,just silence ! That’s why it was so critical for Romney to whip that black Muslim terrorist scum ! Even if you didn’t care for Romney,it was a vote agains’t the black Muslim trash more than a vote for Romney ! Make no mistake,the Republican cowards allowed the black Muslim scum to destroy the U.S. !
“You cannot legislate against a madman” – Winston Churchill.
How would that scum Churchhill know that ? Churchhill was FDR’s shadow,whining for the U.S. do this and that for England and the Queen. This at a time when the U.S. was fighting for her own survival.
So you want people with a demonstrated history of mental illness to have guns? That is all this law is doing.
You obviously haven’t been paying attention. Are you an Obama internet troll? Go read the WND story and then re-read the ammoland story here. The victims do NOT have mental illness of any kind at all. The victim’s names are part of a database of known or suspected gun owners. The gun owners are then targeted with declarations of “mental illness:” by unknown government bureaucrats that the victim has never seen or met before. Many of these bureaucrats are paid a bounty of $2500 (this figure is 6 years old, bounty may be higher or lower now) for each gun… Read more »
As long as that determination is made through due process I have no problem at all with it. This is a gun grab designed to strip as many people as possible of their 2A rights,nothing more. Obama and the liberals are getting real creative in their tyranny agains’t U.S. citizens. This nonsense will never pass the NRA is on top of it.
Wasn’t it Obama that said we could keep our own health insurance if we liked it ? This is just another illegal Obama gun grab scheme to prohibit as many people as possible.
Here’s the corrected link to the WND story that lines up with the story here on Ammoland.
https://www.wnd.com/2015/06/vets-told-they-can-buy-back-2nd-amendment-rights/
This is similar to the veterans administration declaring veterans to be “incompetent” and demanding that they turn over their firearms to the VA pigs. WND did a story on the VA pulling this scam on veterans last month, link is here: https://www.wnd.com/2015/06/vets-told-they-can-buy-back-2nd-amendment-rights/#TGOQiFgWXMmeisfV.99 Apparently the Obama VA and/or SSA administrators start with a letter campaign targeting a large database of recipients with letters claiming that the recipient has been determined to be “incompetent”. The letters claim that VA or SSA has “received evidence” that the recipient was classified as “incompetent.” No actual facts were presented or actual names of persons or… Read more »
I guess my question would be: Has anybody documented a single case where the federal government has actually siezed and or charged anybody under this or any other program that actually was not a danger to himself or others?
Aside from the THOUSANDS of veterans that have been denied the ability to purchase firearms because of this, no. I was stationed with a Robert Whitlock at Lowry Air Force Base in the 70s.
Not so fast. Try actually looking for a few victims that posted their stories about this publicly. The events I am referring to are all printed in public newspapers and stated during radio interviews with VA psychiatrists. Try paying attention to the thousands of admissions and personal stories from victims of this illegal process before denying their claims.
Sorry guys, I misinterpreted your comments. You got it right.
But the trolls out there need to read these comments and check them out before denying that this was happening.
I notice you said SSRI drugs would ‘rightfully’ get a veterans name added to the list of prohibited persons. Is that your personal opinion ? I’ve never heard of any law passed where SSRI drugs are cause for firearms forfeiture. I don’t see it on the form 4473 either. Just curious.
https://www.ammoland.com/2013/04/every-mass-shooting-in-the-last-20-years-shares-psychotropic-drugs/
https://antidepressantsfacts.com/2000-05-16-School-Shootings-Psychotropic-Drugs.htm
https://medicalwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2011/09/mass-violence-caused-by-anti.html
https://ssristories.org/
https://www.naturalnews.com/031017_violence_prescription_drugs.html One of the Columbine school shooters was on Luvox, the other shooter was also on drugs but investigators won’t release the records to allow us to discover which one(s).
https://healthy-family.org/school-shootings-in-the-us-ssri-drugs-dr-walsh/
https://www.anh-usa.org/take-this-antidepressant-and-you-too-may-have-a-violent-psychotic-break/
https://www.digitaljournal.com/article/339440
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10022021581 list of 66 school shootings linked to SSRI drugs
https://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/features/drugs-medical/ssri-suicide-akathisia.html#.Va1CYk1RGUk
There are thousands of articles describing this.