Democrats’ Double Standard: D.C. Voting Rights Vs. Gun Rights
BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today accused Congressional Democrats of “world-class hypocrisy” for pulling a voting rights bill for Washington, D.C. residents because Senate Republicans added an amendment that would strengthen their gun rights, as affirmed in the June 2008 Heller ruling by the Supreme Court.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said the bill – which would give the District an official vote in the House of Representatives, most likely a Democrat – would not be considered this week because of the Republican amendment. That amendment would repeal a ban on certain firearms in the District, even though last year’s high court ruling said outright bans of whole classes of firearms are unconstitutional. CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, co-author of These Dogs Don’t Hunt: The Democrats’ War on Guns, said House Democrats “are acting predictably, in a manner that belies everything they’ve said for the past decade about supporting gun rights.”
“Once again,” he said, “Democrats are revealing themselves as the party of restrictive gun control. If the citizens of Washington, D.C. have a right to full congressional representation, they also have a right to own the firearm of their choice. For Democrats to argue that one right is more important than another – especially after last year’s Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment – they are engaging in world-class hypocrisy.”
The bill would add a congressional seat in Utah, ostensibly to balance the District’s representative. But Democrats do not want to ease the highly restrictive gun regulations adopted by the District after the Supreme Court struck down the city’s decades-old handgun ban. Gottlieb said this stubbornness clearly demonstrates that the party’s so-called “support” for the Second Amendment is “just lip service.”
“Democrats argue that the right to representation is not related to the right to keep and bear arms,” Gottlieb said, “but that’s nonsense. This country was born because our founders were being taxed without representation, and because British troops tried to disarm the citizens. Those issues are just as equal today as they were 230 years ago, and Democrats on Capitol Hill need to understand that.”
