BELLEVUE, WA – Former Vice President Joe Biden’s proposed gun control plan that includes “a voluntary buyback program or federal registration” has the same goal of eliminating semi-auto sporting rifles, but just has a different sales pitch, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

“The Biden gun ban scheme falls right in line with the other Democrat presidential candidates’ goals of prohibition and confiscation,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “What we need to ban are assault politicians that have no respect for our rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. We will get a chance to do that at the ballot box in 2020.”

Biden’s proposal would reportedly regulate semiautomatic rifles the same way fully automatic machine guns are regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934. It would close alleged “loopholes” in the background check system and prohibit the sale of so-called “assault-style rifles” and original standard capacity magazines, and push the states to adopt so-called “red flag” laws with no due process protections.

“Remember,” Gottlieb recalled, “this is the same Joe Biden who once famously counseled people to fire a double-barreled shotgun into the air from outside their house to scare away home invasion robbers. That’s not only illegal, it’s dangerous in a populated area. And this guy thinks he can tell us about ‘gun safety’ measures?”

Gottlieb recalled Biden as a “champion of every gun control scheme that came along” while he was on Capitol Hill. Biden has frequently bragged about pushing the Clinton ban on semi-auto rifles and magazines in the 1990s that studies later showed had little to zero effect on violent crime rates.

“One thing we can say about Joe Biden is that he’s consistent,” Gottlieb observed. “He has consistently voted against the rights of law-abiding gun owners. He has consistently pressed for gun control laws that have not prevented criminals from committing crimes with firearms that Biden’s laws said they shouldn’t have. He has consistently been wrong on Second Amendment issues. And now he’s offering a re-packaged version of gun control that he hopes will sound like a moderate compromise to the gun prohibition crowd.

“Joe Biden,” Gottlieb concluded, “has consistently ignored the fact that the Second Amendment protects a fundamental right, not a privilege that can be regulated by his, or anyone else’s gun control scheme.”