“The liberal municipal governments of such cities as New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle, and states including New Jersey, Connecticut, California and Massachusetts should not be receiving taxpayer funds while violating the constitutional rights of those taxpayers,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “It is ironic that all of those places are willing to spend millions of dollars to attack the rights of gun owners, when they should be protecting civil and constitutional rights, including the Second Amendment.”

In a letter to Sessions, Gottlieb stated that local or state laws that infringe upon or impair the Second Amendment rights of citizens have done nothing to reduce violent crime, but they have reduced the ability of honest citizens to defend themselves.

In addition, the Citizens Committee is launching a national petition drive to mobilize grass roots support for withholding Justice Department funds from the offending local and state governments that are thumbing their noses at two U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming the individual right to keep and bear arms.

“Why should American taxpayers see their hard-earned money used to erode their fundamental rights,” Gottlieb asked. “Those of us on the front lines of this civil rights battle see this as the ultimate abandonment of common sense. When government becomes the enemy of its constituents, it should be penalized, not rewarded.”

Gottlieb noted that anti-gun local governments penalize their citizens in many ways. For example, when Chicago lost a federal lawsuit to the Second Amendment Foundation, the city paid SAF’s legal bills by taking money from police department funds.

“These stubborn anti-gun local governments will spitefully hurt their citizens any way they can,” Gottlieb observed. “The time has come to slap them down, and the best way to get their attention is to turn off the funding spigot.”