BELLEVUE, WA – Today’s sentencing of anti-gun former California State Senator Leland Yee to five years in federal prison on racketeering conspiracy charges that included a scheme to traffic in firearms shows that “world-class hypocrites are not above the law,” the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said.

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said that because the ex-lawmaker had pleaded guilty last year, “Yee is easily the biggest hypocrite on gun control to have ever walked the halls of the capitol in Sacramento, if not the entire United States.”

Yee was once honored by the Brady Campaign for his gun control activities in the California legislature. In 2006, when Yee was serving in the California Assembly as Speaker Pro Tem, he was reportedly named to the Brady Campaign’s “Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll” for co-sponsoring so-called micro-stamping legislation.

“Maybe the Brady Campaign should do universal background checks on people it decides to honor,” Gottlieb said. “Remember, the Brady bunch, and Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown group thinks gun owners should all be treated like criminals. Well, here’s a guy who pushed the gun control agenda, and he is a criminal.”

The case reminds Gottlieb about a string of embarrassing criminal cases brought against various members of Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns.”

At today’s sentencing, the Los Angeles Times noted, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said there was no reason to be lenient. The judge called Yee’s crimes “essentially an attack on democratic institutions.” And the Associated Press reported that Judge Breyer “called the weapons allegations against Yee…unfathomable and said it was frightening that Yee would be willing to go entirely against his public position on guns in exchange for money.”

“This really is worse than that,” Gottlieb observed. “Leland Yee worked hard enough to make California gun owners miserable that he was honored by a gun control organization. Yet now he stands convicted and sentenced to prison for engaging in the kind of criminal activity that is condemned by honest gun owners.

“Maybe the people should start asking who are the real good guys and who are the real bad guys,” he concluded.