CHEYENNE - It's deja vu for Democrat Gary Trauner when it comes to his stance on guns in his bid for Wyoming's lone seat in the U.S. House.

Trauner said that campaign ads by his Republican opponent, Cynthia Lummis, falsely accuse Trauner of supporting a national federal registry of gun owners.

"When they talk about a federal centralized database for guns, they are making it up," Trauner said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's never something I believed in, and it's never something that I said."

Republican Rep. Barbara Cubin, who is retiring from the U.S. House after seven terms, made the same accusations against Trauner two years ago when she narrowly beat him.

Tucker Fagan, Lummis' campaign manager, said the Lummis campaign ads are based on answers Trauner provided in 2006 to a National Rifle Association questionnaire about gun rights issues.

Trauner said he may not have been clear two years ago, but he provided a copy of this year's questionnaire that shows him supporting the NRA's position that no records should be maintained on any lawful gun buyer.

On the 2006 questionnaire, Trauner did not choose the same answer on the federal registry question that he chose on this year's questionnaire.

Instead, he wrote in his own answer two years ago, saying in light of the war on terror that he believed "having access to purchase records for a reasonable period of time is a common sense approach to balancing gun owner's rights vs. national security needs."

Trauner maintains his 2006 stance was not in favor of a federal registry. Rather, he said his stance reflected his belief then and now that any impositions of a gun registry should be left up to individual states and not the federal government.

"I'm not a fan of any type of registry, but if states want individual dealers to keep records at their place of business that might be up to them," he said.

The NRA's political action committee endorsed Lummis earlier this month, but the organization graded Trauner as among strong supporters of its gun rights agenda.

"I feel pretty good that they know I'm going to protect the Second Amendment," Trauner said.

Fagan said the Lummis campaign had not seen Trauner's answers to this year's NRA questionnaire.

"We did it based on the one we knew," Fagan said.

Fagan said the NRA endorsed Lummis because of her "long-standing commitment" to gun rights.

"She, her family, hunts, uses weapons, understands the proper use of them, and have never wavered from that," he said.