A prominent gun rights organization announced Monday that it is launching a nationwide media campaign against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives' proposed ban on a popular form of ammunition commonly used in AR-15s.
"We are buying several hundred thousand dollars worth of TV and radio time," said Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation. "We will be on Fox News and Glen Beck's Blaze Network."
The media campaign comes after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) announced plans to reclassify the M855 5.56 cartridge as armor piercing and, therefore, illegal. Since the M855 round, commonly referred to as "green tip," contains steel and can be fired from a certain style of AR-15 that the agency considers a handgun, the ATF has decided it should be banned under the Gun Control Act of 1968 and Law Enforcement Officers Protection Act of 1986.
The agency is currently accepting public comment on the proposed ban.
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), founded in 1974, has over 650,000 members and supporters. It is the group behind many recent rulings in favor of gun rights, including the Supreme Court's landmark decision in District of Columbia V. Heller.
SAF intends to flood the ATF with comments against the ban during that period. "The president has long supported a ban on semiautomatic rifles and their magazines," Gottlieb said in a press release. "Now his administration is going after the ammunition. Evidently, they’ve decided that rifles and magazines won’t be a problem if people have no ammunition to put in them."
"There are less than two years remaining in Barack Obama’s presidency," Gottlieb said in the release. "He’s scrambling to create a legacy, and a big part of that is effort is to establish himself as the man who brought restrictive gun control to America."
"We’re giving Americans the voice to stop him."