Reuters reported Thursday afternoon that up to 160,000 Social Security numbers and a million driver’s license numbers “may have been accessed.”

“This is the kind of vulnerability and privacy invasion that law-abiding, responsible firearms owners fear,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “If hackers can break into the state court system, they can just as easily break into records kept on gun owners at the Department of Licensing, where the handgun registry is currently maintained. This could be a gold mine for gun thieves.

“This is why,” he continued, “we insisted that the state pistol registry be abolished and that no records be retained on background checks when we agreed to discuss background check legislation earlier this year. The other side wouldn’t budge. They want gun owner privacy to be at risk.”

Gottlieb noted that retaining records is a key ingredient of every background check proposal put forth by the gun prohibition lobby.

“Now the gun control lobby is threatening an initiative campaign to push their agenda,” Gottlieb observed. “If it mirrors what they tried to accomplish in Olympia earlier this year, you’re likely to see gun owners and other privacy advocates joining forces to oppose them.

“It’s appalling that this happened,” he concluded, “but it provides a stark lesson to those who would disregard the privacy of up to two million of their fellow citizens by demanding that records be kept on people who merely exercise a civil right protected by both the state and federal constitutions. Either you support privacy, or you support criminals. There’s no middle ground.”

Sen. Coburn’s proposal would have allowed armed private citizens to legally carry firearms on Army Corps of Engineers lands in states where carrying firearms for personal safety is already legal. The vote was 56-43, four votes shy of a required 60-vote threshold.

“Democrats set that threshold,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “It’s okay when an anti-gun minority thwarts the will of the people, but when pro gun rights senators do it, they scream bloody murder.”

Currently, citizens may only bring firearms on to Corps lands for hunting. Other federal lands, primarily national forests and national parks, are open for carrying firearms for all kinds of reasons, including self-defense.

“Senator Coburn was trying to do the right thing at the right time,” Gottlieb said. “Corps lands should not be any different than other federal lands where the Second Amendment certainly should apply.

“However, anti-gunners led by California’s Barbara Boxer pandered their opposition on the flimsy grounds that law-abiding armed Americans create some kind of national security risk, which is ludicrous,” he continued. “But that argument certainly shows how Sen. Boxer and her gun prohibitionist colleagues feel about citizens exercising a constitutionally-protected fundamental civil right.”

Coburn, who serves on CCRKBA’s National Advisory Council, argued that existing federal law would still protect “critical infrastructure” by prohibiting weapons in such areas.

“The fact that 11 Democrats and one independent supported Coburn’s measure shows that it has bipartisan support,” Gottlieb said. “Sen. Coburn pushed through the earlier amendment allowing firearms in national parks, and this effort was a natural progression to open up more lands to legally-armed citizens. Boxer and her allies have once again demonstrated an unreasonable fear of their fellow citizens.”

“The BJS data covers 1993 to 2011 and suggests that for almost 20 years, the gun prohibition lobby has been consistently wrong about private gun ownership and its correlation to crime,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “The Pew report suggests that the public has been essentially hoodwinked into believing otherwise.”

An Associated Press report about the Pew Research revelation suggested that “intense publicity generated by recent mass shootings” may help to skew the public perception about gun-related violent crime.

“The release of these reports blows holes in the gun prohibition agenda,” Gottlieb stated. “If violent crime had gone upward, gun grabbers would exploit the fact as proof that more guns in private hands lead to more violent crime.

“However,” he added, “if the gun rights community argued that the BJS data proves increased gun ownership leads to lower violent crime rates, the dominant liberal media would savage the notion. Of course, this is the same anti-gun press that has sensationalized crimes while remaining silent about the actual crime data.

“The BJS data shows that gun-related homicides declined by 39 percent from 1993 to 2011, and the Pew Research Center found that gun-related homicides fell from 7 per 100,000 in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2010, a decline of 49 percent,” Gottlieb said. “The declining percentages go in the same direction. Firearms-related homicides have plummeted dramatically while more Americans bought more guns, including millions of semi-automatic modern sporting rifles. More people are licensed to carry in more states, and crime is down.

“It is time for the gun control crowd to acknowledge they have been consistently and undeniably wrong,” Gottlieb concluded, “and admit that their agenda has never been about crime, but about public disarmament. They don’t want to prevent gun crime, they want to prevent gun ownership.”

“The Obama administration should accept full responsibility for illegally flooding Mexico with guns that are now being used by drug cartel gunmen,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “But he has deliberately told his audience half a story about how many of those guns made it into their country.”

The president told a crowd at Mexico’s Anthropology Museum that he will “continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people.”

“Mr. Obama talks a good game,” Gottlieb said, “but once again he may be hitting only two of 22 tries to score. If he were really interested in keeping guns out of the wrong hands, he would instruct the Justice Department to enforce existing laws.

“One thing to keep in perspective,” he continued, “is that all of these guns were purchased at retail and the gun traffickers passed background checks, and retailers were instructed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to allow the sales to go ahead.

“If there is a loophole in the current background check system,” Gottlieb noted, “it should be called the ‘administration loophole’ because they’re the ones responsible, not firearms dealers, gun shows or law-abiding U.S. citizens.

“The measures being proposed by the president will not prevent a single crime in Mexico and he knows it,” Gottlieb continued. “The president would have Mexico believe that the reason for their crime is our gun laws and the Second Amendment. It’s another blame game approach where Mr. Obama points fingers at everyone but himself and the horrid handling of a disastrous gun trafficking effort in which firearms retailers followed the law and his own people didn’t.”

“Piers Morgan has made a habit of demonizing and insulting American gun owners,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb observed. “If he so dislikes the people who call this nation home, a nation that has twice rescued Great Britain and the world from war, then perhaps it is time for him to make good on his threat. There are flights leaving daily.”

Morgan professed in December that he loves the United States “as a second home and one that has treated me incredibly well.” He told the London Daily Mail that he is the victim of an “ongoing war of verbal attrition in America” due to the gun rights debate. At the time, he suggested part of his problem is that he is British, “a breed of human being who burned down the White House in 1814 and had to be forcefully deported en masse.”

“This Friday,” Gottlieb noted, “is the 238^th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord; the day in 1775 that the government sent troops to disarm the colonial militia. It was the first time on our soil that the government tried to enforce gun control and it did not work out too well for Mr. Morgan’s ancestors. Like the Redcoats of old, he wants to take modern sporting rifles and pistols away from today’s American citizens.

“Our forefathers sent a message to the British that day, that tyranny is not welcome on these shores,” he added. “Morgan’s on-air demagoguery towards gun owners is a different type of tyranny, but it is no less unwelcome.

“Face it,” Gottlieb said. “I have more guns than Morgan has viewers. And guess what? I bet his viewers have killed more people than my guns!

“Piers Morgan, in our ‘Yank’ vernacular, ‘ain’t from around here’,” Gottlieb concluded, “and has no business dictating how we should live. This country’s armed citizens came to his country’s aid twice in the past century, and a lot of them died to protect Mr. Morgan’s freedom. Since he voluntarily hinted at it last December, Morgan should take this opportunity to butt out.”

“Our support for this measure was contingent on several key provisions, the cornerstone of which was a rights restoration provision that is not on the schedule for consideration,” said a frustrated CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “This is not a reflection against Senators Joe Manchin or Pat Toomey, who are staunch Second Amendment advocates, and I want to thank them for all of their efforts to include as many protections for our gun rights as possible.

“But it appears the Democratic leadership in the Senate was opposed to letting this important consideration come up for a vote,” he said. “We told everyone including a number of senators, that while there are many pro-gun rights provisions added to the main body of the bill, our support was contingent on this additional amendment coming to the floor. When we say something, we mean it.”

Rights restoration has been withheld from American citizens for more than two decades, ever since Sen. Charles Schumer – when he was still in the House of Representatives – successfully strong-armed a provision to withdraw funding for rights restoration investigations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“Senators Manchin and Toomey are not to blame for this,” Gottlieb stated, “as they have been negotiating in good faith throughout this process. But Schumer and other anti-gun Democrats are continuing their campaign of demagoguery in order to permanently disqualify as many Americans as possible from being able to exercise their fundamental rights under the Second Amendment.

“If the Manchin-Toomey alternative now goes down to defeat,” he continued, “Democrats in the Senate, led by Harry Reid, have only themselves to blame. While the Manchin-Toomey alternative has a significant number of gains for gun owners, it will not include this key provision, upon which our support was dependent.

“We cannot, in clear conscience, continue to support a measure that will not include this critical relief component,” Gottlieb concluded. “If Democrats like Schumer thought we could be flim flammed on this, they were wrong.”

The perennially anti-gun Schumer told reporters that a concealed carry reciprocity amendment that may be offered to the alternative bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey – announced last week as a substitute for Schumer’s own draconian anti-gun background check bill – would make New York “much more dangerous.”

“This legislation could change Times Square into the OK Corral,” the senator asserted.

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, who helped craft some of the language in the Manchin-Toomey alternative, said Schumer “once again cannot tell the difference between reality and his own extremist anti-gun rhetoric.”

“His opposition to any legislation that would benefit gun owners is obvious in the way he is trying to characterize the Manchin-Toomey proposal as a public safety disaster,” Gottlieb said. “Obviously he’s afraid of the alternative bill or he would not have taken the time to demonize it. Their bill provides for gun  rights restoration, immunity from prosecution for selling a firearm later used in a crime, interstate sale of handguns and other gun rights benefits, which he opposes, and it prohibits gun registration, which he supports, and adds a 15-year felony prison sentence for government officials who violate the registration provision. In short, the alternative bill represents everything he hates.”

Gottlieb pointed to another Schumer remark that “doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Said Schumer: “To allow criminals to go to other states, get a permit for concealed carry and then carry their guns concealed here in New York…outrageous.”

“Senator Schumer knows that no criminal can travel to another state and get a carry license because law enforcement agencies would flag that person in a minute,” Gottlieb said. “When he throws around canards like that, it proves the desperation of his position. He will stop at nothing to prevent a reasonable alternative to his anti-gun extremism from gaining traction.”

He pointed to recent political scandals in the New York Legislature, which just passed a new restrictive gun control law, where a state senator and state assemblyman were arrested last week, as “one small example.”

“But look at politics in recent years,” Gottlieb observed. “From state and federal scandals, to arrests involving several members of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, we have had example after embarrassing example of public officials being charged with violating various laws. Does anyone think former Congressman Anthony Weiner, who had to quit his post over a lewd e-mail scandal, should clear a mental health screening to buy a gun?

“If you compare percentages,” he continued, “the rate of criminal activity by politicians is probably far higher than the rate of crimes committed by the general public.

“What this underscores,” he said, “is the reason gun laws don’t work and never will. People who make the laws we have to live under break them anyway, just like criminals routinely disobey gun laws. Based on their own experience, politicians should know that the gun laws they pass will not prevent crime.”

Gottlieb pointed to crooks like former Louisiana Congressman Bill Jefferson, sent to prison after authorities found $90,000 in his freezer during an investigation. He cited former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, now in prison for racketeering and extortion.

“It is both sad and disgraceful that the list goes on and on,” Gottlieb said. “There are politicians with domestic violence problems, others who accepted bribes, some who stole money or were involved in other criminal acts.

“No wonder citizens are disgusted with politicians and don’t trust them,” he concluded, adding tongue-in-cheek, “And these people want to know why there’s a run on guns and ammunition?”

The president is putting the full force of the White House behind gun control measures, and he took the opportunity to tell the nation “Shame on us if we’ve forgotten” the Dec. 14 outrage.

“Shame on you, Mister President,” declared CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “for trying to capitalize on that tragedy to push an anti-gun agenda that has been on your wish list since before you took office.

“We haven’t forgotten Sandy Hook,” he continued, “nor have we forgotten that during the first weeks of your administration, Eric Holder floated trial balloons about renewing and expanding the ban on modern sporting rifles. We also haven’t forgotten that your administration tried to exploit the Fast and Furious debacle to expand gun regulations in the Southwest. We haven’t forgotten that you extended executive privilege to thousands of documents subpoenaed by Congress that are related to that disgraceful operation.

“The shame is on your administration and your allies on Capitol Hill and in the gun prohibition lobby for pandering a tried-and-failed strategy of gun bans and backdoor registration schemes as a panacea to crime,” Gottlieb stated. “Shame on you for your ‘we’ve got to do something’ harangue and then admitting that it will not prevent further violent crimes.

“For Barack Obama to suggest that the nation should be ashamed for not blindly submitting to his gun grabbing political agenda is not simply arrogant, it’s absurd,” Gottlieb remarked. “His attempt to create national guilt because millions of citizens refuse to be subservient to his political desires sounds more like the rant of a spoiled emperor than a sensible president.”

“Instead of banning the most popular firearm in the country,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “we need to ban politicians who assault our rights. We are appalled and disappointed that Sen. Feinstein and her cronies have advanced this measure, which demonizes firearms that are used thousands of times each year to protect lives and property from criminal attack.”

Gottlieb noted that FBI crime data says that rifles of any kind are used in only a fraction of violent crimes annually, “yet Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have allowed this legislative travesty to move forward.”

“Demonizing certain firearms, and by default the people who own them, has become a scapegoat strategy by politicians who have allowed a broken justice system to release violent offenders back on the street while disarming their potential victims,” Gottlieb said. “By focusing their energy on disarming law-abiding citizens, politicians like Sen. Feinstein are perpetuating a myth that firearms cause crime. That’s as foolish as believing that cars cause drunk driving.”

Sen. Feinstein acknowledged that her legislation faces an uphill battle when it reaches the full Senate.

“We will encourage our members to contact their senators about this legislation,” Gottlieb said. “Public policy and constitutional rights should not be subject to the whims of gun prohibitionists who are quick to exploit the crimes committed by a few crazy people, in order to advance their agenda of public disarmament.”