Dick Durbin: “on Tuesday, Senator Grassley came to the floor advocating for an amendment. His amendment dealt with access to guns for…”

“on Tuesday, Senator Grassley came to the floor advocating for an amendment. His amendment dealt with access to guns for those who have been determined by the Department of Veterans Affairs to be mentally incompetent due to injury or disease. Senator Grassley's amendment was 10 lines long. It would simply cut off funds for the VA to ``treat'' any person who the VA has determined to be mentally incompetent under its current administrative process as a prohibited gun purchaser under Federal firearms laws. On behalf of myself and other Senators, I objected to this amendment. I pointed out that Senator Grassley's amendment would likely require purging the NICS background check database of thousands of records of people who have already been diagnosed with serious mental illness and referred to NICS by the VA. As Senator Grassley no doubt knows, current law requires a Federal agency that submits a record to NICS to notify the Attorney General if the basis upon which the record was submitted to NICS no longer applies. The Attorney General is then obligated to remove the record from NICS within thirty days. If the Grassley amendment were to pass and prohibit the VA from continuing to ``treat'' a mentally incompetent person as a prohibited gun purchaser, then it casts into doubt the basis upon which tens of thousands of NICS mental health records were submitted. So Senator Grassley's amendment would likely purge those records from NICS.…”