The U.S. Senate appears ready to debate S. 659, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act on Wednesday, Feb. 25, and gun owners need to call Capitol Hill and urge their Senators to support these measures and block a filibuster, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) said today.
“The other side has pulled out all the stops to defeat this important measure,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan M. Gottlieb. “Gun rights activists who want to help preserve the firearms industry, and bring an end to years of costly, frivolous lawsuits against perfectly legal businesses, need to call their Senators now.
“Anti-gunners will be flooding the Capitol switchboard with telephone calls on Tuesday,” Gottlieb said. “Firearms owners need to counter that with the same energy and devotion to our civil rights as the other side is showing in their effort to destroy the Second Amendment. Senators need to hear from their constituents and the message should be loud and clear: Pass S. 659, with no anti-gun amendments.”
S.659 would stop frivolous lawsuits against the firearms industry and law-abiding gun dealers. These lawsuits have been consistently thrown out of court, Gottlieb noted, because they are without merit. In a couple of cases, cities have dropped their legal actions, either because they found out during discovery that they had no case, or because they could not produce documentation to support their specious claims, he noted.
On Tuesday, he said, gun owners calling the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 should ask to be connected with their U.S. Senators. Be prepared to call twice to reach both Senators from your state.
Call between the hours of 9 am and 1 pm EST. That means calls from the Central Time Zone should be made between 8 a.m. and 12 Noon. Calls from the Mountain Time Zone should be made between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. Calls from the West Coast need to be made between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m.
“The anti-gun crowd is calling Tuesday its ‘national call-in day’ to try and stop this legislation, which President Bush has already said he would sign,” Gottlieb stressed. “Gun owners need to turn Tuesday into a ‘national gun rights victory day’.”