Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I listened carefully to the explanation of my friend and colleague from Iowa. I hope there are several things we can agree on at the outset. The first is that we don't want someone who is a convicted felon or is so mentally unstable that they cannot be trusted to own or purchase a firearm. I hope we can agree on that.

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Mr. DURBIN. Good.

I hope the next thing we can agree on is that we want to make certain that our veterans are treated fairly, that they are given every consideration for having served our country, but we do not want to put them in harm's way either by way of suicide or by committing a crime with a gun, and we want to have a process that respects that goal. I hope my colleague and friend from Iowa would agree with that.

The problem we have is the Senator from Iowa is amending an appropriations bill. The difficulty you face when you amend appropriations bills, in most instances, if you are not authorizing and strictly sticking within the four corners of an appropriations bill, you can cut off funds--no funds shall be spent for--and that is what the amendment of the Senator from Iowa does. No funds shall be spent at the Veterans' Administration for--and he just described the process.

Here is the difficulty. This amendment as written doesn't solve the problem; it creates a bigger problem.

I will concede at the outset to the Senator from Iowa that we should be sitting down and resolving a very serious issue between the definition of ``mental defect'' and ``mental competency'' between the NICS law and the VA. There is plenty of room for us to sit down and come up with a reasonable way to deal with the situation. But the amendment offered by the Senator from Iowa just basically says, unfortunately, that we are going to weaken the law that prohibits people with serious mental illnesses from buying guns.

Currently, the Department of Veterans Affairs informs the FBI NICS gun background check database when a veteran has been found in a VA proceeding to be mentally incompetent because of injury or disease. I want to make sure that is clear in the Record. This is what it says. In connection with an award of veterans' benefits, the VA formally may determine as ``mentally incompetent'' a person who ``because of injury or disease lacks the mental capacity to contract or to manage his or her own affairs, including disbursement of funds without limitation.'' This is an adjudication, a hearing on mental competency which goes to the question of whether the veteran is mentally incompetent because of injury or disease.

Under the amendment offered by the Senator from Iowa, VA mental health determinations would no longer count as prohibiting gun possession. Tens of thousands of names currently in the NICS system would likely need to be purged, meaning these people could go out and buy guns. Last year the VA told my staff they had supplied 174,000 names to the NICS database because of diagnosed mental conditions.

I do not dispute what the Senator from Iowa suggested--that some of these veterans may be suffering from a mental illness not serious enough to disqualify them from owning a firearm, but certainly many of them do.

Last year the VA told us that this list of 174,000 names includes 10,168 individuals diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, 3,981 individuals with major depressive disorder, 2,835 individuals with bipolar disorder, and many others who have been found to have very serious mental illnesses.

Allowing people with these serious mental illnesses to buy guns raises the very serious risk of suicide and violence. Already we are seeing an average of 22 suicides by veterans every single day. That is double that of the civilian population. To hand guns over to people such as the 14 or 15,000 whom I have just described who have serious mental illness is dangerous--dangerous to them, members of their family, and to the public.

The VA's referral process is not haphazard. There are due process safeguards to make sure the VA is not referring names inappropriately. The VA has set up a relief program for a veteran to contest a finding of mental competency. If we need to revisit that process--and as I said at the outset, I am not arguing that we shouldn't--we need to do it in the context of substantive legislation so that we treat the veterans fairly, treat their families fairly, and treat the public fairly in dealing with this constitutional protection. But simply invalidating the mental health records of 170,000 people the VA has supplied to the FBI, as this amendment would do, is dangerous--dangerous to the veterans, dangerous to their families, and dangerous to the public.

Let's do this in a thoughtful, orderly way, not by an appropriations bill.

I do object.

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, before my friend and colleague leaves, we have worked together for years, and I respect very much his legislative capability. He and I are working together on some very important legislation.

I am not a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee. I don't know if the Senator from Iowa is a member--he is not. This is a subject matter that is in the jurisdiction of that committee.

Let me just concede at the outset that reporting 174,000 names to the FBI goes too far, but eliminating 174,000 names goes too far. We need to find a reasonable way to identify those suffering from serious mental illness who would endanger themselves, their families, or others and to sort out those who don't fit in that category. We can do that and we should do that in a reasonable way, so we are respectful of veterans and also respectful of the general public's right to be safe from the misuse of firearms.

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