Bloomberg’s anti-gun push

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week stepped up his already prominent role in the debate over gun control, announcing that he would spend $12 million of his own money on an advertising campaign to pressure Congress into expanding background checks for gun buyers. The ads—one of which features a gun-wielding hunter saying “background checks have nothing to do with taking guns away from anyone”—will target 15 senators in 13 states. Later this month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is expected to put a gun-control package to a vote, having removed the assault weapons ban that he felt lacked sufficient support in Congress.

National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre has finally “met his match,” said Newsday in an editorial. On NBC’s Meet the Press, he said Bloomberg “can’t spend enough of his $27 billion to try to impose his will on the American public.” But what has LaPierre’s gun lobby been doing all these years, if not imposing its will on Congress with the help of “millions of dollars happily anted up by American firearms manufacturers?” LaPierre is just sore that the NRA—with 4.5 million members and a $300 million budget—is finally being rivaled in funding and fervor.

Actually, “Bloomberg’s activism is the best thing to happen” to the pro-gun lobby for years, said Noah Rothman in Mediaite.com. People are sick to death of Nanny-in-Chief Bloomberg and his “unashamed efforts to ban or curtail” any pleasures he deems remotely harmful, including smoking and sugary drinks. Now he’s after our guns. People outside the East Coast are bound to reject this latest expression of Bloomberg’s “unvarnished progressivism.”

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It’s going to be an interesting battle, said Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan in WashingtonPost.com. Bloomberg’s support for background checks is shared by almost 90 percent of the American public, and he may be the only person wealthy enough and stubborn enough to push this law through. Still, “it’s hard to see how $12 million spent in March of an off-year will have a tremendous persuasive effect on the incumbents.” But even if Bloomberg is tilting at windmills here, the pro-gun forces would be foolish to discount the formidable influence of “one of the most compelling actors in the political world.”