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  • 2016-11-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Social Security Recipients Barred from Owning Guns? (en)
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  • In July 2015, the Social Security Administration (SSA) proposed — and in December 2016 issued — new rules to implement provisions of the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 (NIAA) that require Federal agencies to provide relevant records to the Attorney General for inclusion in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The rule update was originally tagged as part of an effort by the Obama administration to strengthen gun control efforts after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, efforts that include trying to plug holes in the firearms purchase background check system. The intent of the rule is to bring the Social Security Administration in line with other laws that regulate who gets reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), a database used to prevent gun sales to excluded classes such as felons, drug addicts, dishonorably discharged service members, fugitives, and illegal immigrants. The rule would require that the Social Security Administration report to the Attorney General, for inclusion in the NICS, Social Security recipients who have been deemed unable to manage their own affairs due to marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease: Such persons would thus be unable to purchase firearms unless they successfully appealed the removal of their names from the NICS database through an established appeals process. Opponents of the rule have maintained that the implementation of a process to automatically report impaired individuals to the background check system could unfairly exclude large numbers of people who pose no real danger to others through gun ownership: Other critics maintain that the appeals process established by the rule is an unfairly onerous one: The federal background check system was created in 1993 through the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (named after White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was severely wounded during the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan) and requires gun stores to check the names of prospective buyers through the system before every sale. The database holds over 13 million records, entered at the local, state, and federal level, but it has not always served its intended purpose due to inconsistencies in reporting and use — for example, after Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, it was found that he had been declared mentally ill by a court and ordered to undergo treatment, but the law in effect at the time did not require that he be added to the NICS database. A similar system already in use by the VA for beneficiaries has drawn similar criticisms: Although this rule implementation has been reported in some quarters as an attempt to bar all Social Security recipients from gun ownership, it would pertain exclusively to the subset of Social Security disability recipients who have been deemed incompetent to handle their own financial affairs. (en)
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