The gun rights of America's veterans have been under attack by Veterans Affairs (VA), leading to distrust. As a result, Representative Eli Crane (R-AZ) introduced two pieces of legislation protecting the right of veterans to carry and preventing VA staff from disarming them, which just passed out of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
Rep. Crane's first bill, the Veteran Gun Rights Restoration Act, would rule all previous submissions of VA data to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) as unlawful. This is because the VA's Fiduciary Rule for veterans labels them as mentally defective, thereby denying them the right to bear arms.
As the Arizona Congressman noted in June when similar amendments he introduced to the 2025 appropriations bill passed the House, over 260,000 veterans have been affected by this rule since the Clinton Administration, and many returning veterans are hesitant to receive care from the VA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in fear of having their right to carry revoked.
The second bill introduced by Rep. Crane is the Safeguarding Veterans 2nd Amendment Rights Act, which would prohibit VA employees from participating in proceedings related to state gun confiscation laws, which is tied to the Fiduciary Rule mentioned above.
"It's unacceptable that the constitutional rights of more than a quarter million of our nation's heroes have been blatantly trampled on at the whim of unelected bureaucrats. I'm very grateful that my bills, which would help remedy the un-American assault on the rights of those who served, is advancing through the legislative process," Crane said in his press release.
As a veteran himself, Crane's legislation has often focused on his fellow former soldiers. In March, he introduced a bill that would prioritize the hiring of veterans with relevant skills into Federal agencies for land management, such as the Forest and National Park Services, in response to severe understaffing in those agencies.
In April, a bill he introduced transferring ownership of Federal land in Gila County to the State of Arizona to construct a veterans' center passed the House.
