Chief Tango sent us a link to an opinion piece written by Lindsey Donovan who claims to be an Army veteran married to an active-duty soldier. She is a volunteer leader for the Georgia chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, part of Everytown for Gun Safety which probably explains why her opinion is ill-informed and borders on illiteracy. <\/p>\n
Donovan’s opinion piece is entitled “Disgraceful gun bill endangers veterans: Army vet<\/a>” – she’s talking about the Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act which is supposed to end the practice of letting bureaucrats make decisions about whether or not veterans can own weapons.<\/p>\n My own experience is what fuels me to speak out and urge our lawmakers to take a stand against this very dangerous bill. Shortly after my husband\u2019s last deployment, a soldier who served in his unit died by suicide with a gun. It happened a few days after we saw that soldier. The shock I felt was indescribable. And the pain and sorrow I felt for those left behind, I hope to never feel again. To this day I still think about that individual. I don\u2019t so much concentrate on the why, but the how. It was the gun, a deadly means to a tragic end.<\/p>\n In basic training, I was assigned a “battle buddy.” We were each other\u2019s keeper; we had a duty to one another, a bond cemented by a shared experience. I look at my fellow veterans in the same terms, staying true to the Warrior Ethos of \u201cI will always place the mission first, I will never accept defeat, I will never quit and I will never leave a fallen comrade.\u201d Granting access to firearms to veterans who have been deemed mentally incompetent by the Department of Veterans Affairs is not looking out for the men and women who so courageously served our country. It is a disgrace, and it is far from patriotic.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So I would ask Lindsey if the soldier who killed himself had been determined to be mentally ill. Had he been forbidden by the Army to own a weapon or to be issued a government weapon to perform his duties? Without answers to these questions, her paragraph is just emotional knee-jerk reaction to a bad situation.<\/p>\n The VA is not your battle buddy. You aren’t my battle buddy. Unfortunately for all of you meddling gun grabbers there’s a Constitution, the 5th Amendment of which states “No person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”, it doesn’t say that a functionary of the VA can take your property, but rather due process of law.<\/p>\n