A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
- Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
Uh, I don't think this latest Obama Regime plot is compliant with Amendment II:
The Obama administration has in its crosshairs some 4.2 million Social Security recipients who use a fiduciary to handle their monthly benefits, according to the Los Angeles Times, which reports that the White House is looking to prohibit those who have been found incompetent to manage their own financial affairs from owning guns.
The proposal — part of an overall maneuver to bolster gun laws since the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut — would require the Social Security Administration to report those 4.2 million people to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which ensures felons, drug addicts, illegal [aliens] and others cannot buy firearms.
According to the Times, the 4.2 million figure represents those who receive monthly benefits but use a fiduciary because of "marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease."
The figure breaks down to about 2.7 million people with mental health problems — "a potentially higher risk category for gun ownership" — and 1.5 million who have their finances managed by others "for a variety of reasons."
Well, now, that's a fascinating set of criteria. So, basically, if you're a geezer, you can't own a gun, because it's just now been discovered that the Sandy Hook massacre was REALLY carried out by armed commandos from the nearest nursing home, their armored wheelchairs leaving a sea of twitching corpses in their wake?
Not if Sandy Hook Elementary hadn't been a "gun-free zone," they wouldn't. Even if the codgers had been popping wheelies.
This story hits rather close to home for me, because for the past almost four years, I have been my widowed father's fiduciary for his financial affairs. Not because he's a moron (he's one of the canniest people I've ever met), or crazy (he's one of the sanest people I've ever met), or incompetent (when he moved my grandmother out west from Ohio in 1983, he settled all her affairs and got her house and car sold all in two weeks), or sick (until his recent bout of spinal meningitis), but because (until twenty-three months ago) I was a professional accountant, so it simply made more sense for me to do it for him, plus I'm his son and I try to make it a habit of honoring my father (as I did my late mother), and my mother had been the family bookkeeper for the entire fifty-five years of their marriage. But I keep him informed of everything that is going on and he regularly asks me questions. He is most definitely involved.
My father was also, until about three years ago, a gun owner. A shotgun and three revolvers, as I recall. He never advertised it nor was he an overt Second Amendment advocate, but he "packed" for years and was prepared to defend his family - my mother and me - if the need had ever arisen (which, thankfully, it never did). He sold them in 2012 because my mother's early-onset dementia that was only discovered after her death from a cerebral hemorrhage had caused her to unwittingly spend them into a thirty thousand dollar hole, leaving him essentially broke (I've since, through negotiating debt forgiveness, making steady repayments, and destroying all of Mom's old credit cards, gotten that balance down to about four grand. That, combined with finally getting Dad's house sold three months ago, has put him back in the black. Hey, it's what we fiduciaries do.). In short, he needed the cash.
And it's a good thing that dear old Dad completed that firearms transaction when he did, because now the Obama Regime would be flagrantly illegally and unconstitutionally coming to confiscate his "heat" for no other reason than that he's old and feeble and....can no longer defend himself.
Again, there is no surprise to this latest outrageous act of despotism, other than perhaps that this White House has waited so long to put it in motion. It's got all the hallmarks of the trademark Obama power grab: He's bypassing Congress, breaking out his three branches of government (his pen, his phone, and his putter), and painting with one honking big brush:
This sounds eerily similar to certain provisions of New York’s detestable SAFE Act, where large swaths of people are lumped together in a generalized category and then disarmed. In New York, anyone who has ever sought therapy or been issued a prescription drug for “depression” can find themselves on a similar list and are then faced with the daunting and expensive prospect of going to court to prove they are not crazy.
Guilty until proven innocent, in other words.
In this case, one assumes that a senior citizen might be able to go to court and attempt to prove that they’re not incompetent, but how many Social Security recipients can afford that?
My dad sure as shinola couldn't have.
We’re not talking about a small number of people here, either. There are currently more than four million people in the United States who fall into that category. I’m sure it’s possible that some of these people are truly mentally impaired, but wouldn’t their family, guardians or medical professionals be in the best position to make such a judgement? Or shouldn’t someone at least have to file some sort of complaint along those lines to have the situation investigated before sending in the troopers to collect their weapons? [emphasis added]
Apparently not.
But then you know what happens when you paint with one honking big brush: You get paint in areas that you didn't necessarily intend for the paint to go. And that can provoke a strong reaction:
The NRA and other gun-rights advocates have already said they will object.
National Council on Disability member Ari Ne’eman told the Times that the independent federal agency would oppose "any policy that used assignment of a representative payee as a basis to take any fundamental right from people with disabilities."
"The rep payee is an extraordinarily broad brush," he said.
Dr. Marc Rosen, a Yale psychiatrist who has studied mentally ill veterans and how they manage their money, cautioned the Times that "someone can be incapable of managing their funds, but not be dangerous."
"They are very different determinations," Rosen said.
So Uncle Barry has pissed off not just gun rights groups, but veterans groups and disabled rights groups as well. The latter of which is, last I checked, a Democrat constituency.
But then the cited criteria of his latest gun grab is just the excuse and pretext, given the ridiculously extreme lengths to which they're already taking it, and which has already got federal courts balking:
In December, Bloomberg reported on a federal appeals court ruling that a history of mental illness should not prohibit citizens from owning a weapon.
The case under consideration involved a Michigan man who in 2011 was denied a gun permit based on the fact that he had been committed to a mental institution in 1985 after suffering a breakdown during a contentious divorce, according to Bloomberg.
After a month, the man was released and returned to work. But federal law bars those with "a past history of mental illness" from owning a firearm unless they qualify for an exception.
A Cincinnati appeals court found that the law’s provision barring gun ownership for anyone "adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution" violates the Second Amendment, according to Bloomberg.
Because it's not reasonable. And that doesn't even get us back to the phrase, "shall not be infringed," which is every bit the absolute and declarative a clause that it looks.
The bottom line is, again, what we already knew: Barack Obama and the Left don't care if "mentally incompetent" people have guns, because they don't want ANYBODY to own a firearm, they are hellbent on confiscating every last one of them, all the way down to water pistols, and they will and are using every pretext, no matter how flimsy or what even federal court rulings and precedent says to the contrary, in blanket violation of the Constitution and the rule of law.
As I say, a trademark power grab from the man who is "being the president he always wanted to be".
Exit quote from Jazz Shaw: "But once again our hands may wind up being tied because the President is using a new interpretation of existing law and mining into a database completely unrelated to law enforcement to find a way to eliminate gun rights."
And he's not the only one.....
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