Obama address disappoints Bloomberg on gun control
by Dave Workman, Senior Editor
Anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his colleague, Boston Mayor Tom Menino, have urged President Obama to push for more gun control.
The two are co-founders of Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG).
They were hoping he would use the State of the Union speech to advance the anti-gun agenda, and capitalize on the fact that retiring Congresswoman Gabriele Giffords (D-AZ) left office because of the head wound she suffered in January 2011 during a public appearance in Tucson. Giffords resigned in January just days before the president’s address, explaining to her constituents that she needs to focus on her recovery, and that it is best for her and the people of her district in Arizona for someone else to take her place.
However, the anti-gun mayors were disappointed when Obama did not use his speech as a launch platform for more anti-gun measures. This was the second time Bloomberg’s call on the president to capitalize on the Giffords shooting went unanswered. In 2011, Bloomberg also urged Obama to take advantage of the then-recent Tucson shooting to push a tough gun control agenda.
In a letter to Obama on the eve of his address this year, Bloomberg and Menino urged the president to exploit the Giffords departure. She had announced just days before that she would be voluntarily stepping down.
“We hope her departure from public life will be temporary and her return will be swift. And we hope that you will take the opportunity to address her departure, and the causes of it, in your State of the Union Address…” they wrote.
TGM obtained a copy of the letter, in which the two mayors reminded the president that after the Tucson, AZ, shooting that left Giffords seriously wounded and six others dead, Obama promised to “do everything we can to put a stop to the daily death toll from gun violence in America.” Among the steps the president wanted to take was to tighten up on background checks to “keep those irresponsible, law-breaking few from getting their hands on a gun in the first place.”
But this is an election year, and with the economy already turning independent voters away from Obama, it is likely that he had no intention of infuriating and energizing the firearms community with rhetoric aimed at twisting down on their gun rights.
Bloomberg and Menino maintain that “Criminals and other dangerous individuals are still exploiting massive gaps in the national do-not-sell database.” They offer no evidence that this is accurate, but instead alluded to preliminary data that showed 65 police officers died from gunshot wounds suffered in the line of duty in 2011, and they asserted that, “In at least 35 of these police killings, the shooter was a criminal or other dangerous person who was barred by current law from owning a gun, but slipped through gaps in the background check system.”
It is not clear where they got that statistic, since background check information is protected by federal law, a law that Bloomberg’s MAIG has been battling for the past few years.
Anti-gunners have a new label…again
There is a new term in the lexicon of gun prohibitionists and their press cheerleaders: “Gun Reformer.”
This has become a substitute for “gun control advocate” or “gun prohibitionist,” as indicated by a story in The Hill that discussed the anti-gun efforts of Mayors Michael Bloomberg of New York and Thomas Menino of Boston.
In describing the attempt by Bloomberg and Menino to have President Barack Obama launch an anti-gun diatribe during his January State of the Union address, The Hill dubbed both mayors as “prominent gun reformers.” The newspaper also identified their most recent effort to advance their gun control agenda as a “gun-reform push.”
It wasn’t clear from the article whether The Hill invented the term, or picked it up.
This new term joins a list of other buzz words and terms employed by the gun prohibition movement to sanitize their campaign to restrict public access to firearms. After the 1994 mid-term elections when angry gun owners threw out more than 50 Democrat members of Congress who voted for the Brady Law and the Clinton semi-auto ban, “gun control” became “gun safety.” Reporters henceforth began alluding to anti-gun legislation as “gun safety measures.”
Anti-gunners have invariably portrayed their agenda items as “sensible” and “responsible,” subliminally suggesting that opposing such measures would be irresponsible.
Now the term “gun reformer” suggests that proponents of gun control are now trying to reform bad laws.
