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GOA Celebrates Major Win as House Advances Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act
After decades of fighting what gun rights groups called one of the worst hidden gun control policies in America, supporters say hundreds of thousands of veterans are finally getting their rights restored.
According to Gun Owners of America, the House has now passed Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act introduced by Mike Bost, legislation aimed at permanently ending the VA fiduciary rule that stripped gun rights from veterans who received help managing their finances.
The numbers attached to this thing are staggering.
GOA says roughly 270,000 veterans were added to the federal NICS prohibited persons database over the years simply because the Department of Veterans Affairs assigned them a fiduciary to assist with financial matters.
Not because they committed crimes. Not because a judge declared them dangerous. And, not because they were involuntarily committed.
Because they needed help handling benefits paperwork or balancing a checkbook. That distinction became the entire fight.
GOA’s Ben Sanderson described the policy as one of the “most sinister pieces of gun control ever done to veterans,” arguing the VA effectively treated fiduciary appointments as proof someone was mentally defective under federal firearm law.
Critics of the rule have hammered the lack of due process for years.
At one congressional hearing highlighted by GOA, lawmakers repeatedly pressed VA officials on whether veterans were ever required to be proven dangerous before losing their rights.
The answers were blunt: no.
Bost himself argued the policy created a system where veterans could lose constitutional rights without meaningful ways to appeal the decision.
And the statistics were ugly.
According to testimony cited by GOA, nearly 98% of all federal agency submissions to the NICS prohibited database in 2023 came from the VA fiduciary system.
That’s a jaw-dropping number.
GOA credits years of lobbying, congressional pressure, Trump-era executive action, and recent VA reforms under Secretary Doug Collins for finally killing the rule.
Now, supporters say Rep. Bost’s bill would permanently codify those changes so future administrations can’t quietly resurrect the system later.
And for a lot of veterans, that’s really the point here.
As multiple lawmakers argued during hearings: the people who volunteered to defend the Constitution probably shouldn’t lose constitutional rights because a bureaucrat helped them manage direct deposit forms.
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