DoD Committee Recommends 'High Priority' Firearms Ban on Nearly 50% of Active Service Members
As if it is not enough for them to come after the Second Amendment rights of ordinary Americans, the woke mob is now attempting to impose gun control on active-duty military members.
On Saturday, Fox News reported that the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, which was founded by the Department of Defense in 2020 to help deal with the rising rate of military suicides, issued a report on recommended action that the DoD can take to curb suicides.
The report recommended that “[o]n DoD property, raise the minimum age for purchasing firearms and ammunition to 25 years,” as well as implement a seven-day waiting period for all firearms purchased on military bases and create a national database for firearms purchased on DoD property.
The report indicated that the ban on service members under 25 purchasing firearms was a “high priority,” meaning that it is the main way by which the DoD will attempt to curb military suicides.
However, there is one massive problem with this idea, and that is the age demographics of the military.
About half of all active service members in the armed forces fall into that under-25 age group that would be banned from buying firearms under the new proposal.
According to Statista, in 2021, nearly 600,000 active service members were under the age of 25 out of around 1,300,000 total. That comes to about 46 percent of service members that would be forbidden from purchasing firearms.
Therefore, this is an absolutely insane proposal by the DoD, as it recommends stripping half of active-duty military members of their Second Amendment rights.
It also ignores the factors that are driving members of the military to contemplate suicide in the first place.
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Things such as high-tempo deployment schedules, low morale and mental health are nowhere mentioned in the report. The report only focuses on guns as the reason for an increase in suicides.
In addition, this does absolutely nothing to stop military suicides. All it does is prolong suicides by seven days or a few hours if members decide to drive off the base to purchase a firearm.
Plus, a member under 25 years of age could easily obtain a weapon from an older member of the armed forces and use it to end his or her life.
There are simply too many ways that this proposal can fail.
Frankly, this is very common when it comes to the left and gun control. Whether it is suicides or mass shootings, the left only focuses on weapons as the reason that these tragedies take place.
This proposal is all the more repulsive because it is done in the name of protecting our active-duty military members. In reality, it is just another Trojan horse for gun control, targeting some of our country’s greatest heroes.
These are patriotic Americans who put their lives on the line in order to ensure to protect the Constitution and our way of life. Aren’t they entitled to the rights of the Constitution that they are defending?
This proposal ignores the real issues and does nothing to solve the problem. Until the woke DoD is willing to face the facts, the sad reality is that military suicides are going to continue.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
