During yesterday’s confirmation hearing for Supreme Court justice nominee Neil Gorsuch, California Senator Dianne Feinstein took dead aim at the National Rifle Association, branding the nation’s oldest civil rights group (founded in 1871) as an ‘extreme organization.”

Feinstein’s NRA comment came after she voiced her expectations that the Supreme Court will have final say on air and water pollution and just before she addressed employers who “[discriminate] against workers.”

CSPAN 2 aired Feinstein’s comments: “It is the Supreme Court that will have final word … [on] whether the NRA and other extreme organizations will be able to block common sense gun regulations, including those that keep military-style assault weapons off our streets.”

Many things are at play in Feinstein’s statement, including the ongoing Democrat animosity toward the fact that the Supreme Court rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) pose a great hindrance to the future of gun control in this country. Moreover, Feinstein’s statement betrays her continued support of an “assault weapons” ban, such as the one that Democrats enacted during the Clinton administration or the one Feinstein herself unsuccessfully pushed after the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“Assault weapons” are of course a politically-manufactured term created by gun control fanatic Josh Sugarmann to describe any firearm that looks remotely like a military firearm, regardless of their actual function or capability.

Semi-automatic weapons (self-loading firearms that fire one shot per trigger pull) have been in common use in the United States for more than a century, having first been produced in large commercial quantities in the late 1800s. The semi-automatic action has been the most popular kind of firearm action for handguns for decades, and remains the most popular action type for rifles. Semi-automatics may soon become the most popular form of action for shotguns as well.

Feinstein and her dishonest ilk use the term “military-style assault weapons” in an intentional attempt to confuse the public.

“Assault weapon” is supposed to confuse the public into thinking that selective-fire military firearms are easily sold to the general public, which is an outright falsehood.

Selective-fire weapons such as assault rifles, submachine guns, and machine guns have been tightly restricted by the National Firearms Act since 1934, and while there are more than 240,000 registered “NFA” guns in civilian hands in the United States, they are almost never used in crime, with only two documented occurrences known. Further, the manufacture of new NFA firearms for the general public  was outlawed 31 years ago, when the Hughes Amendment passed as part of the Firearm Owners Protection Act in 1986.

Yes, you read that correctly: real military firearms capable of firing more than one shot per trigger pull have been banned for more than three decades.

The National Rifle Association is the largest and oldest Second Amendment rights advocacy group in the United States, and is also the largest training provider, with more than 100,000 certified trainers. They are hardly out of the mainstream.

Feinstein, however, represents a view that would crush the core right of American citizens to be armed for their own defense against both criminals and the tyrants which most concerned the Founding Fathers, a corrupt and all-powerful government she champions.

There are extremists in Washington. Dianne Feinstien, with her warped view of the natural right of all human beings to armed self defense, is one of them.