The FBI coordinated secretly with hospitals and medical centers to strip U.S. citizens of their rights to own, buy, or even use firearms , according to a trove of internal documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Behind closed doors and without congressional approval, the FBI has worked hand in hand with the Secret Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to strip over two dozen people of their gun rights with internal forms, records show. On the heels of this revelation by the Washington Examiner in December 2022, newly obtained documents and emails shed light on how the bureau apparently received a helping hand from medical facilities to waive gun rights from at least five people.
“Any time you have evidence of private entities coordinating with federal agents to strip Americans of their rights, the public should be alarmed and demanding answers and action,” said Aidan Johnston, federal affairs director for Gun Owners of America, a firearms rights group. “This is just the latest terrifying new instance of the illegal NICS self-submission form being used in nefarious ways, and those who used it to violate the public’s trust must be held to account.”
Between 2016 and 2019, the FBI presented forms to U.S. citizens at their homes and in other undisclosed locations that registered them with the bureau’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the Washington Examiner previously reported. Newly obtained records, however, date the FBI’s usage of the form back to 2011.
Signatories of the internal forms were asked to voluntarily identify as a “danger” to themselves or others, as well as lacking the “mental capacity adequately to contract” their lives. The very existence of the FBI’s forms has raised significant concerns among First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Reps. Dan Bishop (R-NC) and Andrew Clyde (R-GA).
“It really speaks to the rogue nature of the ‘Deep State’ mentality,” Ken Cuccinelli, an ex- Department of Homeland Security official under the Trump administration and the former Virginia attorney general, told the Washington Examiner.
New documents shared with the Washington Examiner, which Gun Owners of America obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shed light on how facilities in New Hampshire, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma, used the gun forms and supplied signatory records to the FBI. The forms are from 2011 and 2019, the year the FBI has said it discontinued their usage.
