Vietnam Vet Barred From Owning a Gun Because of a Teenage Misdemeanor 45 Years Ago

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A 19-year-old sailor stationed in Annapolis, Md., in 1968 was arrested for getting into a fight with an alleged member of a street gang.

Now, more than four decades later, the 64-year-old U.S. Navy veteran has been stripped of his right to own a gun.

Jefferson Wayne Schrader of Cleveland, Ga., has been fighting a losing battle in the courts since 2008 to get his name off the fed’s firearm ban list. In fact, just last month, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., upheld a lower-court ruling barring him from owning a firearm.

“It’s a depressing thing. A depressing thing,” he told TheBlaze in a phone interview, “to have the government treat you like that. It’s not, well, it’s not a good thing.”

The ban list is meant to prevent people of questionable standing, including illegal aliens, drug addicts, people dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military, and fugitives, from buying or selling guns.

And although Schrader — a certified expert with a handgun — served in Vietnam from Jan. 1, 1968, until being honorably discharged in September 1970, the U.S. government believes he is unfit to own a gun because of his teenage misdemeanor.

“Due to a conviction some forty years ago for common-law misdemeanor assault and battery for which he served no jail time, plaintiff Jefferson Wayne Schrader, now a sixty-four-year-old veteran, is, by virtue of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), barred for life from ever possessing a firearm,” U.S. Circuit Judge David Tatel wrote in the court’s January opinion.

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