WASHINGTON - July 26 - The National Rifle Association, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are using the anniversary and site of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for what they are calling a "Restoring Honor Rally."

Calling the date of this rally "divine providence," Beck, the talk show host, has partnered with the NRA and Palin to help him generate interest in the August 28 event. The NRA placed a four-page advertisement for the event outside its monthly magazine, First Freedom. The ad is at www.bradycampaign.org/xshare/bcam/gunlobby/nra/NRA-1st-Freedom-Beck-Palin.pdf.

In a blog just posted, Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke today wrote:

"*this is the same Glenn Beck, a life-member of the NRA, who has insulted the Anti-Defamation League; challenged Keith Ellison, a Muslim who had just been elected to Congress to ‘prove to me you are not working with our enemies;' repeatedly called President Obama ‘a racist' and accused him of having ‘ a deep-seated hatred for white people.' *

"This is the same Sarah Palin, who has purposely stoked fears and resentment among gun-owners by wrongly accusing President Obama of wanting to ban guns; who disregards the 70 percent of Americans who want restrictions on semi-automatic assault weapons; and rejects the medical community's assertion that gun violence in America is a national health problem.

"This is the same Wayne LaPierre, who insists that ‘*it's the guys with the guns make the rules'* a statement that bears eerie similarity to the one John Wilkes Booth authored in a letter on April 14, 1865, the morning before he assassinated Lincoln, that ‘might makes right.'*

Are Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre*, at this place and time, the new keepers of King's dream and of Lincoln's legacy? Or do they, with this event at this place and time, in one of the boldest and most public ways imaginable, mock, and indeed, slander, everything for which these men so nobly stood, and for which they died?"

The blog is on the Huffington Post at www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-helmke/guns-divisive-rhetoric-to_b_659373.html and the Brady Campaign website at blog.bradycampaign.org/.