Obama orders Social Security recipients under increased scrutiny for gun ownership

In what the National Rifle Association has described as “the largest gun grab in history,” the Obama administration is working on a plan to deem ineligible for gun ownership as many as 4 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits through a “representative payee.”

The Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend:

There is no simple way to identify that group, but a strategy used by the Department of Veterans Affairs since the creation of the background check system is reporting anyone who has been declared incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and assigned a fiduciary.

If Social Security, which has never participated in the background check system, uses the same standard as the VA, millions of its beneficiaries would be affected. About 4.2 million adults receive monthly benefits that are managed by “representative payees.”

There is no simple way to identify that group, but a strategy used by the Department of Veterans Affairs since the creation of the background check system is reporting anyone who has been declared incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and assigned a fiduciary.

If Social Security, which has never participated in the background check system, uses the same standard as the VA, millions of its beneficiaries would be affected. About 4.2 million adults receive monthly benefits that are managed by “representative payees.”

While the administration’s stated goal is to keep guns out of the hands of people who are mentally unstable, critics argue that declaring anyone who has been assigned a representative payee could affect Social Security beneficiaries who have things like memory, gambling or past addiction or financial problems but who are otherwise fit for gun ownership.

And the plan is not relegated to the SSA. Based on the Obama memorandum government officials have been directed to use “all relevant federal records” to find Americans who should be stripped of their gun ownership rights. That means bureaucrats will soon be poring over files from the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation, along with “such other agencies or offices as the Chair may designate,” looking for reasons to strip 2^nd Amendment rights.

“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,” the NRA recently warned on its website. “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.”

The post Obama orders Social Security recipients under increased scrutiny for gun ownership appeared first on Personal Liberty®.

from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/obama-orders-social-security-recipients-under-increased-scrutiny-for-gun-ownership/

from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/obama-orders-social-security-recipients-under-increased-scrutiny-for-gun-ownership/