NEWS RELEASE

Citizens Committee for the
Right to Keep and Bear Arms
12500 N.E. Tenth Place
Bellevue, WA  98005

CCRKBA SAYS ANTI-GUN MAYORS’ SUMMIT IS ‘ALL RHETORIC, NO REAL SOLUTIONS’

For Immediate Release: January 23, 2007

BELLEVUE, WA – The highly-touted “summit” of an anti-gun mayors’ association today in Washington, D.C. appears to be all rhetoric and no real solutions to violent crime in America, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

“Whether you’re talking about a desire of anti-gun mayors to get their hands on confidential generic gun tracing data to fuel harassment lawsuits of gun manufacturers and dealers, or a so-called ‘sportsmen’s group’ claiming to represent hunters and shooters and their opinions about the gun issue,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “you still have a gathering from which the nation’s leading gun rights organizations and authorities were excluded.

“Just how irrelevant can it get when the three mayors selected to speak about ‘best practices’ in dealing with crime are Chicago’s Richard Daley, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Milwaukee’s Tom Barrett,” Gottlieb observed. “These three gentlemen are adamantly opposed to the concept of armed citizens defending themselves and their loved ones against violent criminals, and they reign over three of the most dangerous cities in the country.

“For Ray Schoenke, president of the American Hunters and Shooters Association – a rather thinly disguised gun control group camouflaged in hunter orange – to claim it is a gun rights organization is an insult to the intelligence of gun owners and activists across the map,” Gottlieb added. They can claim to represent the views of hunters and shooters, but claiming it doesn’t make it so.

“We’ll tell you what American hunters and shooters really think about so-called illegal guns,” he said. “Punish the people who are breaking the law and stop blaming us for crimes we didn’t commit. Don’t saddle us with ridiculous laws and regulations that are written more to create violations than they are to prevent criminal activity. Let us decide what kind of firearms we want to buy, and how many of them we want to own.

“Most importantly of all,” Gottlieb concluded, “stop trying to fool the American public into thinking you are doing something about crime when all you are really doing is attacking law-abiding citizens and trying to erode our civil rights. If these mayors honestly want to do something for America, they should go home, arrest violent criminals and leave law-abiding gun owners alone.”

With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is one of the nation's premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States. The Citizens Committee can be reached by phone at (425) 454-4911, on the internet at www.ccrkba.org or by email to InformationRequest@ccrkba.org.

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