The Obama administration is pushing to ban Social Security beneficiaries from owning guns if they lack the mental capacity to manage their own disability payments — a move the NRA is calling the “largest gun grab in American history.”
The push is intended to integrate data for the first time from the Social Security Administration into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), OutdoorHub reported. Beneficiaries who have been declared incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and assigned a fiduciary could then potentially lose their right to bear arms.
The move could affect as many as 4.2 million adults who fall under that category, The Los Angeles Times reported.
The move is part of a gun-control effort by the Obama administration following the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, The Times reported.
NRA’s lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, called the plan “the largest gun grab in American history” and an “egregious case of bureaucratic over-reach.”
“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 group said in a statement. “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.”
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A letter signed by dozens of members of the House of Representatives addressed to Carolyn Colvin, acting commissioner of Social Security, urged the agency to halt “any steps to provide information on Social Security beneficiaries or Supplemental Security Income recipients to the NICS.”
“Old age or a disability doesn’t make someone a threat to society. Having a representative payee should not be grounds to revoke constitutional rights,” the letter said.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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