California Sen. Diane Feinstein- No "Assault Weapons" For Veterans, Refers to PTSD as "New"

Congratulations, California- you continue to pick some real winners there.

Feinstein said she wants to make sure that veterans “who are incapacitated for one reason or another mentally don’t have access” to semi-automatic weapons.

Feinstein, at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee last Friday, was discussing an amendment to her gun control bill that would exempt retired military from the so-called “assault weapons” ban:

“The problem with expanding this (exemption) is that, you know, with the advent of PTSD, which I think is a new phenomenon as a product of the Iraq War, it’s not clear how the seller or transferrer of a firearm covered by this bill would verify that an individual was a member, or a veteran, and that there was no impairment of that individual with respect to having a weapon like this. So you know, I would be happy to sit down with you again and see if we could work something out but I think we have to — if you’re going to do this, find a way that veterans who are incapacitated for one reason or another mentally don’t have access to this kind of weapon.”

Perhaps even more alarming is Feinstein's claim that PTSD was a new phenomenon limited to the Iraq War [OMG! Bush's fault!- NANESB!]. However. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder- which was known as Soldier's Heart after the Civil War or Shell Shock after the first World War- was formally recognized by the Committee of Reactive Disorders in 1980.

Also, if Sen Feinstein has such reservations about veterans of the US Military arming themselves, she should perhaps concern herself with veterans not only armed with firearms, but also the power of arrest- as thousands of returning veterans from the Iraq war have found work in local, state, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide over the past decade [Hmmm....interesting how she apparently left out Afghanistan- NANESB!].

And while nobody is advocating giving away guns to clearly disturbed individuals like Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner, one should also be careful in allowing the progressives in this nation to monopolize the narrative in regards to mental health. There have been serious "academic" attempts to get conservative opinions and outlooks classified as a mental disorder in recent years. In the latter days of the Soviet Union, government psychiatrists would have dissidents involuntarily committed to mental hospitals with vague diagnoses like 'sluggish schizophrenia' or 'philisophical intoxication' on a regular basis. The state-ordered confinement saved Communist Party officials the trouble of putting dissidents through a show trial that could potentially backfire on them- a practice that is seeing an ominous resurgence in Vladmir Putin's Russia.