Obama plan could ban 4.2 million Social Security recipients from owning guns | AL.com

The Obama administration is taking steps to keep some Social Security recipients from owning guns, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.

Let's talk about that:

What's the plan?

According to the report, the White House wants to expand prohibitions from owning guns to those whose Social Security payments are handled by others.

Specifically, the plan would require the Social Security Administration to report those recipients to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, the same process used to prevent guns from being sold to felons, drug addicts, immigrants in the country illegally and others.

How can that happen?

In 2013, President Obama issued an order directing all federal agencies to improve their reporting to NICS. Under that directive, the prohibitions were expanded to include the Social Security Administration.

Federal gun laws already in place prohibit certain people from owning guns, including those with "marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease." Under the terms of the proposal, Social Security beneficiaries who are unable to manage their own affairs would be included in that prohibited group.

Already going on in the VA

That same background check process is already used by the Department of Veteran Affairs to prohibit some veterans from owning firearms. According to a 2013 Senate report, the VA is responsible for reporting more than 143,000 beneficiaries, including about 83,000 veterans, to the "mental defective" category of NICS.  According to the Times, more than half of the names on the VA list are of people 80 or older, and are often suffering from dementia.

How many people could be affected?

As many as 4.2 million adults receive monthly Social Security benefits that are managed by someone else, known as "representative payees."

But wait...

So that means someone who has trouble balancing their checkbook could be prohibited from owning a gun? Maybe, and some think that's not fair.

"Someone can be incapable of managing their funds but not be dangerous, violent or unsafe," Dr. Marc Rosend told the LA Times. "They are very different determinations."

And that brings us to the opposition...

The NRA said it will fight the plan.

"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," NRA said on its website.

http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/07/obama_plan_could_ban_42_millio.html