PRNewswire-USNewswire
BELLEVUE, Wash., March 17 — A revelation by the Washington Times that President Barack Obama is trying to quietly end the armed pilot program, making air travel more vulnerable to terrorist attack, should outrage travelers, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
“The Washington Times nailed it,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, who proposed arming pilots just hours after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and championed the armed pilot program. “What Obama is doing is risking public safety, as the newspaper put it, ‘in the name of an anti-gun ideology.'”
The newspaper reported in its Tuesday edition that President Obama is “quietly ending the federal firearms program” by diverting some $2 million from the training program to hire “supervisory” staff, whose job, it appears, will be to harass armed pilots through unnecessary field inspections.
“How dare the president, or anybody in his administration, take measures to erode the safety of air travelers,” Gottlieb questioned. “The armed pilot program provides a guaranteed level of security to the public. There may or may not be an air marshal aboard every airplane, but there is definitely a pilot in the cockpit.
“We trust commercial airline pilots with $500 million aircraft,” he continued. “We can certainly trust them with $500 pistols to defend those planes, and the lives of their passengers.
“Certain individuals have never liked the armed pilot program,” Gottlieb acknowledged. “These anti-gun, anti-self-defense bureaucrats seem more interested in their own power, and protecting their little empires, than they are in protecting the public. And now, Obama is catering to their anti-gun bigotry.”