Gun Rights Leaders Join in Opposition to Sotomayor Confirmation

/PRNewswire/ -- Several of the nation's leading gun rights activists, including the heads of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and Second Amendment Foundation, today joined to oppose the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

"It is extremely important that a Supreme Court justice understand and appreciate the origin and meaning of the Second Amendment, a constitutional guarantee permanently enshrined in the Bill of Rights," said a letter from the group, which was hand-delivered to every member of the U.S. Senate. "Judge Sotomayor's record on the Second Amendment causes us grave concern about her treatment of this enumerated Constitutional right."

Included among the signators were Sandra S. Froman, former president of the National Rifle Association; Alan M. Gottlieb, CCRKBA chairman; Joseph Tartaro, SAF president; Gene Hoffman, chairman of the CalGUNS Foundation; several current or former NRA directors; Robert Corbin, former Arizona attorney general and past NRA president; former Congressman Bob Barr; Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners' Action League in Massachusetts; John T. Lee, president of the Pennsylvania Rifle and Pistol Association; Tom King, president of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association; Robert E. Sanders, former assistant director of law enforcement for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and several others, 25 in all.

"The Supreme Court is almost certain to decide next year whether the Second Amendment applies to states and local governments, as it does to the federal government," they wrote. "While on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor revealed her views on the right to keep and bear arms in Maloney v. Cuomo, a case decided after Heller, yet holding that the Second Amendment is not a fundamental right, that it does not apply to the states, and that if an object is 'designed primarily as a weapon' that is a sufficient basis for total prohibition even within the home. Earlier in a 2004 case, United States v. Sanchez-Villar, Sotomayor and two colleagues perfunctorily dismissed a Second Amendment claim holding that 'the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right.' Imagine if such a view were expressed about other fundamental rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, such as the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments."

"We joined in this effort," Gottlieb said, "because our nation stands at a point in history where we either defend all civil rights, or begin to surrender them one by one until none are left. It would be unconscionable to stand silently as the Senate deliberates confirmation of a new associate justice with such evident disregard for a key tenet, if not the critical element, of the Bill of Rights."

"The Second Amendment survives today by a single vote in the Supreme Court," the letter notes. "Judge Sotomayor has already revealed her views on the right to keep and bear arms and we believe they are contrary to the intent and purposes of the Second Amendment and Bill of Rights."

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Senior Gun Rights Activist Blasts Obama at July 4th TEA Party

/PRNewswire/ -- "Obama's shifts of positions on gun rights makes me think of a snake on roller skates," said John M. Snyder at a suburban Washington, D.C. Fourth of July TEA Party. "The President slithers and shimmies in the White House, throughout the country, and on the issues," he added.

He noted that Obama's record in the Illinois Senate and the U.S. Senate showed "there was hardly an anti-gun proposal he would not endorse. He indicated he supported the District of Columbia handgun ban before the Supreme Court struck it down last year. After the Court's ruling, he said he agreed with the decision. He then campaigned as a candidate who would support individual Second Amendment rights.

"But when he had his first chance to nominate a Supreme Court justice, he named a candidate, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who in January ruled with the Second Circuit Court in Maloney v. Cuomo that the Second Amendment does not apply to the states.

"That's not all," said Snyder. "He's trying to persuade the Senate to ratify the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials (CIFTA). This would undermine American sovereignty, and leave to an international body the delineation of Americans' gun rights and regulations of American firearm manufacturers.

"Perhaps worst of all is the Obama Administration's issuance of a Homeland Security Assessment implying that citizens who support gun rights or other American traditions constitute a threat to public order. That's directed against the 100 million people who own 200 million rifles, shotguns and handguns as well as against untold millions of other citizens. The Assessment even targeted returning American servicemen and servicewomen. In effect, the Obama Administration took aim at the American public and the American military. The public outrage was so great that the Assessment was withdrawn, but its issuance shows what these people really think."

A former National Rifle Association editor, Snyder is Public Affairs Director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Manager of Telum Associates, and serves on the board of the National Association of Chiefs of Police. Shotgun News recently named him the senior rights activist in Washington. He was a speaker Saturday at the Prince William County TEA Party in Woodbridge, Virginia.

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