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  • 2013-04-03 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Senator Dianne Feinstein Say 'All Vets Are Mentally Ill'? (de)
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  • A subject of discussion during a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on 7 March 2013 was an amendment offered by Texas senator John Cornyn which sought to modify the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 legislation proposed by California senator Dianne Feinstein by allowing an exemption for former military personnel (in addition to an exemption for retired law enforcement personnel which was already part of the bill). Senator Cornyn objected to the notion that the original bill should provide an exemption for retired law enforcement but not for retired military, saying (in part): The senator's remarks on the issue were eventually encapsulated in a misleading, out-of-context, and paraphrased form intended to make her sound ridiculous: But Senator Feinstein stated neither that all vets are mentally ill nor that the government should prevent [veterans] from owning firearms. What Feinstein did do was express her opinion that creating an exemption to an assault weapons ban (not a general firearms ban) for retired military personnel might be inadvisable due to both the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among that group and the difficulty of verifying a potential gun purchaser was in fact a veteran, and that the proposed amendment should therefore include a provision for screening out mentally incapacitated veterans: Nonetheless, what Senator Feinstein actually did say was the subject of some harsh criticism. Shawn J. Gourley, co-founder of the organization Military with PTSD, penned a rebuttal that took the senator to task for asserting that PTSD was a new phenomenon and suggesting it was an issue only for military veterans: Others countered that the means for verifying a potential firearms purchaser's status as a veteran were already readily available (or could easily be made so): Some later versions of this item included the following block of text: This paragraph was indeed part of a larger piece authored by Burt Prelutsky, but Prelutsky is not a Los Angeles Times columnist, nor were these words published in that newspaper. Burt Prelutsky is a conservative pundit (who occasionally sends letters to the Los Angeles Times), and the text reproduced here is the concluding paragraphs of his 6 December 2009 blog post, The New and Improved Iron Curtain. (en)
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