Many are rejected as out of order and cannot be attached, so legislators attempt to make them applicable to the armed forces.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is no stranger to trying to ram through anti-Second Amendment measures. He has been called the “national face of gun reform” for very specific reasons. Murphy regularly puts himself out in front of every effort to strip gun rights away from law-abiding citizens and for that is applauded by the gun control lobby.
This year, however, his target is surprising even for anti-gun zealots. He is going after the men and women who serve the nation’s defense and attempting to make gun control a military issue.
Murphy introduced an amendment that began innocently enough. It mandated that the military exercise minimum standards for any member who possesses a weapon while on duty. These would include training on everything from actual shooting to safe storage and suicide awareness.
These are already in place for the military branches, so not much to see here. But then it gets worse — much worse.
Murphy’s measure would demand training before any member of the Department of Defense buys a firearm for private use. It requires any service member who has a firearm on a military base to register that weapon with the base commander.
The firearm must be locked away in the residence with ammunition stored in a separate location. As most Second Amendment defenders readily know, this provision runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller decision.
In this case, justices clearly told the District of Columbia that not only could it not prohibit handguns, but it did not have the power to dictate how firearms would be stored in private residences.
Then Murphy’s legislation broaches territory that is surely alarming to every gun rights advocate. If passed and implemented, it would create a de facto national gun registry starting with the military.
All weapons privately owned by military members, whether purchased on the military installation or elsewhere and for whatever purpose, must be registered with base authorities. It does not matter if they are used for hunting and never brought on base.
As any reasonable observer knows, this begins a national registry of millions of firearms owned by armed forces members. This is something that every gun rights advocate argues against as the first step toward confiscation.
The legislation gets progressively worse.
The NDAA amendment would allow the Secretary of Defense to sweep up all information on gun ownership for both military service members and civilian employees.
And the Connecticut senator did not stop there. In a separate amendment he wants attached to the NDAA, he would force a federal seven-day waiting period on firearm purchases and a four-day waiting period to buy ammunition on military bases.
Again, these measures target the young men and women the nation trusts to defend against foreign enemies. As a reward for their selfless service, Murphy would impose stringent measures denying constitutional rights they are sworn to uphold.
Service members are already required to follow federal law as well as the statutes of the state in which they reside. Each firearm sale is regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and subjected to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
Congress would sweep any and all of these proposals into the trash can if they were submitted apart from the NDAA. Out of respect due to our armed forces members, it is imperative that they ensure that these onerous amendments are not attached to funding for the military.
By doing so, they will preserve the rights of those who defend rights for all of us.
