BELLEVUE, WA – Calling it “re-heated rhetoric,” the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) said a paper issued by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence that blames so-called weak U.S. gun laws for terrorist threats is “nothing more than gun control warmed over.”

The Brady Center, formerly Handgun Control, Inc., calls its latest paper Guns and Terror, How Terrorists Exploit Our Weak Gun Laws. It offers several recommendations that amount to a wish-list of long-standing gun control schemes

In response, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb observed, “If they were truly honest, they would call that document ‘How Anti-Gunners Can Exploit the Sept. 11 Attack.’ What they are really attempting is to revive the failed gun control agenda of the 1990s. The American public rejected it then, and they are certainly rejecting it now.

“To justify their re-heated rhetoric against firearms civil rights,” Gottlieb continued, “they are inventing a link between terrorism and American gun ownership. That’s not just wrong, it is morally bankrupt.”

Underscoring America’s changing attitude about gun ownership have been a series of reports in the national press detailing the sharp increase in firearm sales and enrollment in safety and personal protection courses since Sept. 11. Tens of thousands of new gun owners have suddenly discovered the draconian anti-self defense laws that prevent law-abiding Americans from exercising their Constitutional right to own a firearm.

The Brady Center – formerly Handgun Control, Inc. – wants Congress to reinstate a five-day waiting period on gun purchases, deny gun owners’ privacy rights by retaining background check records, repeal 1986 federal legislation that protects the rights of American gun owners, and permanently ban the future sale and transfer of legally-owned semiautomatic firearms, which amounts to a government confiscation scheme. Gottlieb called this proof positive that gun prohibitionists are languishing in the past, rather than moving forward.

“All of these demands were on their agenda long before Sept. 11,” Gottlieb said. “But anti-gunners are seizing on that awful event, cloaking their rhetoric with concerns for national security. All this proves is that patriotism really is the last bastion of scoundrels.”