BELLEVUE, Wash., Jan. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today issued a bristling response to Brady Campaign President Dan Gross, who insisted as he left the White House meeting with Vice President Joe Biden that the current push for more gun control "is not a debate around the Second Amendment."

"The hell it's not," CCRKBA Chairman Alan M. Gottlieb declared. "The right to keep and bear arms is at the core of this anti-gun campaign, and Dan Gross knows it."

The Brady Campaign is one of several so-called "gun safety" organizations that have already met with Vice President Biden and his gun control task force. Gottlieb challenged that definition.

"The Brady Campaign and other such organizations are all about gun prohibition, not safety," he said. "They're not interested in safety when all they want is to disarm law-abiding Americans and taking the best means of self-defense away from crime victims while doing nothing to disarm criminals.

"The White House calling the gun prohibition lobby a 'gun safety' group is tantamount to suggesting that Ted Bundy was an advocate for battered women," he said.

In comments to reporters, Gross insisted that "Words like 'comprehensive' and 'broad' don't mean taking guns away from law-abiding citizens."

"That statement is so demonstrably untrue it's ridiculous that he expects anyone to believe it," Gottlieb said. "Banning an entire class of firearms based primarily on cosmetics is taking them away from people. Imposing extremist regulations on the exercise of a civil right amounts to taking that right away and treating gun ownership like a privilege.

"Among gun prohibitionists," he concluded, "the definition of safety is disarmament. Sure they're not debating 'around the Second Amendment,' they're trying to erode it and ultimately erase it from the Bill of Rights. We're not going to let them get away with it."

With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation's premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.

SOURCE Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms