Rep. Crane Applauds the Trump Administration for Protecting Veterans’ Second Amendment Rights

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced new steps to protect and restore the Second Amendment rights of American veterans.

In a reversal of a decades-long policy, the VA will no longer report veterans to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) as "prohibited persons" for simply having a fiduciary manage their VA benefits.

The Department confirmed that this nearly thirty-year procedure violated both the Gun Control Act and veterans' constitutional guarantees since no judicial or quasi-judicial determination was ever made before these reports were submitted.

Additionally, the directive restores Second Amendment privileges to thousands of veterans who were deprived of their ability to exercise them due to this policy. VA leadership stated that they are working with the FBI to remove all past VA-initiated NICS entries tied solely to fiduciary appointments.

Over the past few years, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) has attempted to bar this practice and retroactively restore these protections to those whose names were wrongfully submitted to the NICS list. In the 118th Congress, he introduced H.R.9053 and H.R.9054, which would nullify all prior VA submissions to NICS and prohibit the VA from participating in state-level gun confiscation proceedings. He has since reintroduced the reforms in this Congress as H.R.496.

During the FY25 appropriations process, Rep. Crane successfully passed an amendment to the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Bill clarifying that any veteran reported to NICS by a VA fiduciary was done so unlawfully and requiring the VA Secretary to direct the Attorney General to remove these names from the system. However, the legislation stalled in the U.S. Senate, preventing the measure from becoming law.

With yesterday's announcement, Rep. Crane celebrated an end to this unconstitutional policy and urged Congress to prevent future administrations from reversing course.

"For nearly three decades, unelected bureaucrats violated the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of our nation's heroes. If the federal government is willing to strip fundamental liberties from those who served in uniform, there's no telling where they will draw the line," said Rep. Crane. "I'm grateful to President Trump and Secretary Collins for correcting this injustice and protecting the freedoms that our veterans fought to defend. Congress must now codify this directive so no future administration can reimplement this disgraceful protocol."