Former U.S. Rep. Allen West is joining the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups to warn that an attack by the Obama administration’s EPA on a Missouri lead processing operation is really part of a back-door attack on the Second Amendment.

In a column posted on his website Sunday, West wrote about the Doe Run company’s lead smelting operation in Herculaneum, Mo., which is being forced to close after the Environmental Protection Agency required it to spend up to $100 million on upgrades the plant.

But to anyone outside Washington, D.C., $100 million is a lot of money – too much, in this case. Doe Run, the last primary lead smelter in the United States, is closing on Dec. 31, eliminating 145 jobs in a town of about 3,400 people.

It will also eliminate the last place for refining lead other than scrap metal in the country, meaning the U.S. will have to import refined lead used for everything from batteries to airport metal detectors and medical devices, thetrumpet.com reports.

And ammunition.

And here’s where West is joining with the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action.

In an October report, the NRA/ILA wrote:

“At this time, it’s unclear if Doe Run or another company will open a new lead smelter in the United States that can meet the more stringent lead air quality standards by using more modern smelting methods. What is clear is that after the Herculaneum smelter closes its doors in December, entirely domestic manufacture of conventional ammunition, from raw ore to finished cartridge, will be impossible.

That means the U.S. military will be dependent on foreign sources — like China — for ammunition for its weapons. Even libs should see the problem with that.

It also mean American gun owners, already facing a long-term ammunition shortage, are looking at a future of more expensive, harder-get-get bullets for the guns the president and his “base” already want to get rid of.

The Obama water carriers at MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” posted a column in October pre-emptively attacking the “conspiracy theory” that an openly, fanatically anti-gun president would use an aggressive Environmental Protection Agency to try a back-door enforcement of gun control. The writer points out that the EPA first started looking at Doe Run during in 2008 under President Bush.

But the MSNBC writer is missing the point (probably deliberately). It really doesn’t matter if the original aim of the EPA’s fixation on Doe Run was really to shut down ammunition manufacture in the United States.

The bottom line is that is what it is doing. And it’s hard to believe the libs that elected this ruinous president are anything but ecstatic about the sneak attack’s success.

As West writes: