Thank you Sen. Burr and Sen. Webb!

This is a good first step but there is more to be done. The suicide prevention bill that was supposed to be about saving their lives, took away their gun rights and this has only taken away their desire to turn to the VA for help with PTSD. I've addressed this many times before. It has managed to keep PTSD veterans from going for help so they can keep their guns. Common sense dictates that it is far better to have a PTSD veteran with a gun and getting help than to have a PTSD veteran with a gun and getting no help. This needs to be fixed to make sure veterans are not discouraged from getting the help they need to heal.

Bill seeks to protect gun ownership for vets
Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Jim Webb, D-Va., have joined forces to try to prevent veterans from losing the right to own a gun if a fiduciary is appointed to handle their finances.

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Mar 24, 2009 13:16:01 EDT

Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Jim Webb, D-Va., have joined forces to try to prevent veterans from losing the right to own a gun if a fiduciary is appointed to handle their finances.

Burr and Webb, both members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, are trying to carve out a loophole for veterans in the Federal Gun Control Act that prohibits the sale of firearms to people who are, in the words of the law, “adjudicated as a mental defective.”

According to Burr, the names of about 116,000 veterans have been turned over to the FBI since 1999 because the Veterans Affairs Department assigned a fiduciary to manage their benefits. That is not the same thing as being a danger to themselves or others, Burr said in a statement included in Monday’s Congressional Record when he introduced a bill, S 669, to prevent the VA from reporting the names of veteran to the FBI.

“VA focuses on whether or not benefits paid by VA will be spent in the manner in which they were intended,” Burr said. “Nothing involved with VA’s appointment of a fiduciary even gets at the question of whether an individual is a danger to themselves or others, or whether the person should own a firearm.”

The bill, the Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, was referred to the veterans committee for consideration.
click link for more