Editor’s Note: Michael Hammond is the legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
Story highlights
Michael Hammond says Michael Bloomberg's idea to spend $50 million on gun safety will fail
He points to the former New York mayor's "arrogance of wealth" being his downfall
Gun owners are smarter than Bloomberg, he says
Like a 3-year-old who thinks he’s just discovered the wheel, billionaire Michael Bloomberg is reveling over his startling new gun control tool: the grass roots.
This is where it hurts to be the neophyte on the block.
Bloomberg: We will fight the NRA with common sense
In the 1980s, when “handgun control” was at its prime, its objective was to compete with the Second Amendment movement in organizing the grass roots.
When “handgun control” become politically incorrect, the reformulated Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence pronounced that its objective was to match pro-gunner’s formidable grass-roots efforts with its own.
In fact, efforts in 2013 to pass Obama’s gun control policies were fueled by perhaps the biggest “grass-roots” organization that the “left” has mustered: Obama’s “Organizing for America.”
Yet, this effort, too, fell short.
It’s not for lack of trying that gun control has failed. Nor is it for lack of arrogance. In fact, Bloomberg, who just announced that he will drop $50 million on so-called “gun safety” efforts, showed the arrogance of a dilettante breezing into a New York restaurant by proclaiming he doesn’t need God’s permission to enter heaven.
Said Bloomberg: “If there is a God, when I get to heaven, I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”
(Beware anyone who thought they would be enjoying “Big Gulps” in the afterlife.)
But Bloomberg’s “arrogance of wealth” may be precisely his downfall. Gun owners are smarter than Bloomberg.
In 2013, after the Newtown incident, our members were more than capable of reading Bloomberg’s duplicitous background check legislation and understanding what it actually did: open a back door to gun registration.
Gun owners also watched, incredulously, when Bloomberg’s minions cheered New York and Connecticut’s massive gun bans and gun registration requirements – only to deny, in Washington, that they supported either of these things.
Furthermore, gun owners understand that they have everything on the line. They understand that, in places such as New York City, the government has been sending letters demanding the confiscation of guns in violation of a 2010 city ordinance.
And they understand that, for them, this is more than a “billionaire hobby” like a yacht or private plane.
Gun owners are not hypocrites. They resent it when Bloomberg insists on his 17-man armed security detail for himself while denying them the right to protect themselves or their families.
So my message to Bloomberg is this: Spend it all. Spend all of it.
Bloomberg’s hatred and hypocrisy has only energized our people, who have enacted 70 pro-gun state laws since Newtown – twice the number of Bloomberg anti-gun laws that have been enacted around the country.
Let billionaire Bloomberg sweep into Alaska and Arkansas and pretend he can buy the people in those states. He will only energize other gun groups who will be forced to oppose red state Democrats.
And the prospects of a sweeping Republican victory will be even greater.
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