NRA News Commentators: Dom Raso
Episode 35
“Vets”
Under Obama’s administration, there’s been a serious downsizing of our military. I’ve got my own thoughts on that, but I’ll save them for another time. Reality is, we’ve got a large number of people getting out of the military with a ton of combat and military experience; men and women being thrown back into civilian life. There have been several incidents already involving these vets and their rights being taken away from them.
Recently, there was a vet that had to defend his home from a felon who was trying to break in. He fired a warning shot in the ground to scare the guy off and then told the police that his military training kicked in. Now whether that’s true or not, or even if he went into combat mode, the guy was having his house broken into. He clearly stated to the guy that was trying to force entry into his home and that he was going to give him a warning shot if he didn’t stop his forward progress. All he did was fire a warning shot into the ground, and then the criminal ran off.
But the focus wasn’t on the convicted felon trying to break into his house; it was on the veteran who did everything possible to safely defend his home. The police actually took his gun away. There is something seriously wrong with our system if we are stripping his gun away because according to the police, he wasn’t justified to discharge a round. According to our oh-so-knowledgeable vice president, that’s exactly what he should be doing to ward off would-be attackers and burglars. Sounds like our vice president is giving us some false info.
That was an unfortunate situation that affected one person, but I also want to talk about a serious problem that’s resulting in many more vets losing their Second Amendment rights for no reason. When a vet is eligible for disability compensation or other benefits, they go through an evaluation process. The way it’s set up right now, if the vet has someone else appointed to manage those benefits on their behalf, they somehow get labeled “mentally defective” and are entered into a background check system as someone unable to buy a gun. This is absolutely wrong. The VA’s review process for assigning a bookkeeper to a veteran in no way determines whether that veteran poses a risk to himself or others. It’s only meant to determine whether or not a veteran needs help managing his or her VA benefits. That has nothing to do with their ability to safely exercise their Second Amendment rights.
More than 100,000 veterans and their family members have been affected by this problem. You can’t just take someone’s right away to bear arms because they need help in other areas. When these guys were overseas risking their young lives for our freedom, the government had no problem putting an M4 in their hands and letting them fend for themselves. So the very idea that that same government would let some paperwork nonsense strip them of their rights that they fought for, is absolutely disgusting.
After you watch this video, I urge you to contact your senator either on the phone or online and let them know that this is a real issue they ought to be spending some time fixing. It’s unbelievable that they’re wasting time talking about useless, unconstitutional gun control laws when there are veterans out there being striped of their rights because of some paperwork problem. So call your senator, and let’s get this fixed.
Call your senators and ask them to support Senate Bill 572, which will correct this injustice.
Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121
