BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms will be visiting Chicago to counter billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign of fear against Prairie State firearms owners.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2011 through FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2011

Bloomberg has teamed up with Mayors Against Illegal Guns to send a moving billboard truck around the country claiming that 34 Americans are “murdered with guns every day.” CCRKBA Chairman Alan M. Gottlieb said Bloomberg’s campaign “tells less than half of a story, so we’re today setting the record straight in Illinois.”

“We’re answering Bloomberg’s flash with genuine substance,” he explained. “We telling people what Bloomberg isn’t telling them. Guns save between 800,000 and 2.5 million lives annually. That’s 2,100 to 6,800 people every day who successfully use firearms to defend themselves, or prevent a criminal attack. In the majority of those incidents, no shots are fired, and nobody is injured or killed. In some cases where shots are fired by armed citizens, several lives are saved.”

CCRKBA has teamed up with the Second Amendment Foundation, which will produce educational materials on firearms rights, the number of lives saved and the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

“While Bloomberg is shooting blanks,” Gottlieb explained, “CCRKBA is hitting the bull’s eye with information Americans need to protect their civil rights.

“Bloomberg’s campaign is a smokescreen,” he continued. “America needs to look behind the façade to see that his ultimate goal is to convince Congress to implement New York-style gun control laws, ban most semiautomatic firearms, stretch background checks out to between six and nine months, and to put gun shows out of business.

“No mayor, regardless how wealthy he is, should dictate to Congress or the people of Illinois the terms of their civil rights,” Gottlieb said. “Michael Bloomberg is spreading hysteria about gun rights. We’re spreading the truth.”