Stockman takes aim at state gun registration schemes

WASHINGTON – Congressman Steve Stockman seeks to cut off federal funding to states that register gun owners or confiscate any gun from any citizen who may legally bear arms.

“In states like New York, gun grabbing politicians are using gun owner registries to hunt down law-abiding gun owners and demand they surrender their personal firearms,” said Stockman.  “My bill ends anti-gun tyranny by cutting off the funds gun grabbers use to implement their tracking and confiscation schemes.”

Stockman’s “Gun Confiscation and Registration Prevention Act” (H.R. 4380) cuts off NICS Improvement Amendments Act and Community Oriented Policing Services [COPS] Program funding to any state that “maintains a registry of gun ownership” or “conducts a program of gun confiscation directed at any firearm which is not prohibited by Federal law or any group of persons who are not prohibited from possessing a firearm under Federal law.”

“The New York City Police Department is taking aim at owners of shotguns and rifles capable of holding more than five rounds, demanding such guns be surrendered, altered or taken out of the city,” Fox News reported Dec. 5, 2013.

“The demand came in the form of some 500 letters mailed out to owners of registered long guns that are in violation of a 2010 city ordinance. The first option for the letter's recipient is to, ‘Immediately surrender your Rifle and/or Shotgun to your local police precinct, and notify this office of the invoice number. The firearm may be sold or permanently removed from the City of New York thereafter,’” Fox News reports.

“Radical activists in state and local government are stomping on the constitutional rights of peaceable citizens,” said Stockman. “It’s up to Congress to enforce the Constitution and protect civil rights like gun ownership.”

The Washington Times’ Communities’s Conor Higgins writes if the bill “comes to a vote, it has the potential to put every politician in the House on record for being pro-registration or anti-registration, right before the 2014 elections, and in plenty of time for the 2016 cycle.”

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