Washington (CNN) – The
National Rifle Association will assert that President Barack Obama’s
attempt to enact new gun control laws will result in the “confiscation”
of people’s firearms in a new web video scheduled to run in five states
and the District of Columbia.
The video
went online around the time Obama began delivering his State of the
Union address Tuesday. In the speech, Obama mentioned his effort to
reduce gun violence through legislative means.NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam told CNN that the organization based its warning on what he said is a Justice Department document, “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies,” that was written in January and given to the NRA.
A Justice Department spokeswoman told CNN that she couldn’t immediately authenticate the document, but did confirm that Greg Ridgeway, whose name appears on it, is currently deputy director of the National Institute of Justice, which is the DOJ’s research arm.
“This internal Justice Department memo says ‘an assault weapons ban is unlikely to have an impact on gun violence,’ ” NRA’s chief lobbyist Chris Cox says in the video that was provided to CNN before it aired online. “Unlikely, that is, unless it comes with something else. Obama’s experts say that a gun ban, like the one being debated right now in Congress, will not work without mandatory ‘gun buybacks and not exemptions.’ ”
Cox continued, “Mandatory gun buybacks. That’s government confiscation of legal firearms owned by honest citizens.”
Cox also said the report noted that gun registration would need to be part of the equation for universal background checks to be effective.
“Requiring gun registration with the federal government, that’s an illegal abuse of privacy and freedom unprecedented in our history,” said Cox, who then urged people to call Congress and express opposition to new gun regulations.
One of the NRA’s main talking points for opposing new gun regulations is that the federal government is attempting to take away citizens’ Second Amendment rights to own firearms.
The NRA will spend about $100,000 in the next 24 hours to run the 1 minute and 40 second video on various news web sites in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Colorado, South Dakota, and D.C., Arulanandam said. Each of the five states has a Democratic senator seeking re-election in 2014.
The emotional debate over enacting new gun regulations was visibly present in the House chamber as gun rights advocates and victims of gun violence attended Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress.
CNN's Terry Frieden and Todd Sperry contributed to this report
