On Veterans Day 2025 Gabby Giffords’ gun control group, Giffords, is pushing more gun control for veterans who avail themselves of Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) services.
Giffords posted to X:
Since 2006, veterans have died by suicide nearly 20 times more often than soldiers have been killed at war. Veterans deserve more than empty words. They deserve leaders who work to protect them.
But many in Congress are stopping the VA from flagging when a veteran is at a heightened risk of harming themselves or others, and therefore shouldn’t have access to a gun.
Giffords is complaining about the efforts Republicans have undertaken to end the VA’s decades-long habit of blocking veterans’ gun rights by reporting said veterans to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for actions as benign as needing help handling finances.
Through the years, Breitbart News has warned of the situation wherein veterans who use a fiduciary to handle their finances face the threat of being reported by the VA and subsequently prohibited from gun purchases. The need for help in balancing finances — even for a time — is equated with mental health problems, and gun rights are revoked.
Moreover, on February 21, 2016, Breitbart News reported that combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who needed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were increasingly hesitant to pursue treatment because they feared a PTSD diagnosis would be used to deny their gun rights under the Obama administration.
A combat vet confined to a wheelchair spoke to Breitbart News anonymously at the time, saying, “I was diagnosed with PTSD. What’s being done to be sure my guns aren’t taken away?” He said he lived with the added anxiety of questioning his every trip to the doctor, fearing that he was one visit away from having his gun rights snuffed out.
Earlier this year, Rep. Eli Crane (R)–a former U.S. Navy SEAL–told Breitbart News that Democrats who support the status quo on bureaucrats being able to strip away gun rights often claim they do so in order to help reduce suicide among veterans, particularly combat veterans. But Crane rejected this line of thinking, saying, “When it comes to suicide, a lot of these individuals, a lot of veterans….who are struggling with PTSD and have some of these issues, one of [their] biggest issues is fear and trauma because [they] thought [they] might lose [their] life in battle against other people with guns.”
He suggested that taking away their guns now only serves to increase the feeling of defenselessness, thereby increasing feelings of fear and fueling the very suicides which Democrats claim they are trying to stop.
Yet on this Veterans Day, Giffords is urging more gun control for veterans.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at [email protected].
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