BELLEVUE, WA – Democrat presidential aspirant Cory Booker’s far-ranging gun control scheme that calls for five-year licensing, invasive background checks, bans on semiautomatic rifles and original capacity magazines and more amounts to an outrageous plan to turn the Second Amendment right into a government-regulated privilege, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

“With this proposal, Booker isn’t just one of those anti-gun politicians who claims to ‘support the Second Amendment…but’,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “he’s literally throwing a constitutionally-enumerated right into the trash, and he knows it. For a person hoping to be elected to the highest office in the land to advocate such an outrageous proposal isn’t just disappointing, it is disturbing.”

Booker’s plan calls for licensing gun owners on a five-year basis. He would repeal the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to expose firearms manufacturers to costly junk lawsuits and other legal harassment. He would resurrect the failed one-gun-a-month mandate that never prevented a single crime when it was tried, and later repealed, in South Carolina and Virginia. The Washington, D.C. law was struck down by a federal appeals court in 2015.

The scheme calls for Microstamping, a technology that has not prevented or solved any crime, and would make firearms prohibitively expensive for no discernable benefit. He would push for so-called “universal background checks” that criminals already ignore, and which might actually encourage more gun shop burglaries, thefts from private homes or police cars, and other illegal gun trafficking.

“Proposals like this underscore why American gun owners are increasingly distrustful of Democrats,” Gottlieb observed. “Booker’s plan is demagoguery on steroids, and it once again targets the wrong people. He doesn’t want to crack down on criminals, he wants to create new ones with the stroke of a pen.

“Booker’s brainstorm is nothing more than a combination of every pie-in-the-sky idea on the gun control wish list,” Gottlieb said. “While his plan is disturbing, what is even more alarming is that not one other Democrat now in the race denounced the plan. If they all agree with Booker, they need to admit it now so voters realize they are all willing to trample on the Bill of Rights.”