On Tuesday, February 17, United States veterans received good news in the form of an announcement from the Department of Veterans Affairs that it will end a reporting activity that has resulted in disqualifying veterans from their Second Amendment rights for decades.
According to a memo published on va.gov, “Effective immediately, VA will not report Veterans to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System as ‘prohibited persons’ only because they need help from a fiduciary in managing their VA benefits.”
“Many Americans struggle with managing their finances, and Veterans’ Second Amendment rights shouldn’t be stripped just because they need help in this area. But for too long, Veterans who needed the services of a VA fiduciary were deprived of their right to bear arms,” said VA Secretary Doug Collins. “Under the leadership of President Trump, we’re correcting this injustice and ensuring Veterans get the same due-process and constitutional rights as all Americans.”
In the simplest of terms, if Veteran Affairs appointed a fiduciary to manage a veteran’s benefits due to inability to handle finances, they were considered adjudicated as a “mental defective” under federal law (18 U.S.C. 922(g)(4)), and prohibited from firearm purchase, possession, or ownership – a practice that completely eluded all normal due process considerations, a fact acknowledged in the press statement: “According to federal law, a decision by a judicial or quasi-judicial body is needed before someone can be reported to NICS.”
The policy of reporting a veteran through NICS as a prohibited person goes back nearly three decades, and effectively treated veterans as second-class citizens when it came to civil liberties.
In addition to stopping NICS reporting, the memo states that “…the department is working with the FBI to remove all past VA reporting from NICS.” Testimony given by Representative Morgan Luttrell on January 23, 2025, before the U.S. House of Representatives estimated that as many as 250,000 veterans have been stripped of their 2A rights under this reporting scheme.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of 15 cabinet-level executive departments of the federal government and reports directly to the President of the United States.
“It is both unlawful and unacceptable for Veterans who serve our country to have their constitutional rights threatened,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi. “It has been my pleasure to partner with Secretary Collins on this project, and I am directing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to review its regulations and propose changes that will prevent current and future violations of our Veterans’ Second Amendment rights.”
