November, 2012.
Larry Pratt, Executive Director of the extremist pro-gun group, Gun Owners of America, suggests that the Health Care for America Plan (or "Obamacare") is going to allow the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to “take away your guns.” According to Pratt (click for sound recording as well):
There’s a big one that doesn’t get much attention as a gun measure but it is, and that’s Obamacare. Obamacare among its many unconstitutional aspects, I’m sorry Supreme Court, has made privacy something that only applies between consenting adults but not certainly our relationship with the government. It says that all of our medical records are available to be pawed through by bureaucrats somewhere in Washington, looking for a reason to disenfranchise gun owners, to say ‘oh you have a medical diagnosis that means you might be a danger to yourself or others so we’re going to come and knock on the door for the BATF to take away your guns.’No surprise that Pratt wants dangerously mentally ill people armed, but since the National Instant Criminal Background Check System was signed into law by President Bush in November 30, 1998, well-before Obamacare was enacted, people who have been adjudicated as dangerously mentally ill or forcefully committed to a mental institution are ineligible for purchasing a gun, and there is also a provision against a general gun ownership database.
Though mental health reporting is often woefully under-reported, between 1998 and the end of 2004 this mental health disqualification nonetheless prohibited at least 221,478 dangerously mentally-ill people from legally purchasing a firearm.
Of course, Pratt offers no evidence for this supposed conspiracy.UPDATE: In January, 2013, Libertarian Senator Rand Paul echoed this conspiracy theory:
[Paul] warned that President Obama’s “going to use Obamacare apparently to have doctors informing on their patients to whether or not they have guns” and will put the information into “government databanks.” He added: “I’m very much opposed to this kind of information going into government databanks because I fear that the time will come when this data will be misused.”
Just another wacko pro-gun conspiracy theory!
