CALL TO DISARMS: Mayor Bloomberg slams President Obama’s gun-control record on “Meet the Press” yesterday. (
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Mayor Bloomberg yesterday unleashed his strongest criticism yet of President Obama’s record on gun control, saying thousands will die if the president doesn’t act, and ripping his current policies as “ridiculous.”
Obama needs to show leadership following Friday’s elementary-school massacre, Bloomberg said, or more deaths will follow.
“He calls for action, but he called for action two years ago,” the mayor charged on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“If he does nothing during his second term, something like 48,000 Americans will be killed with illegal guns.”
“This should be his No. 1 agenda.”
Bloomberg, who founded the Mayors Against Illegal Guns coalition, then zinged Obama for signing 2009 legislation allowing people to carry guns in national parks and Amtrak trains.
“I assume that’s to stop the rash of train robberies which stopped back in the 1800s. This is ridiculous,” Bloomberg said.
“I think the president should console the country, but he’s the commander in chief as well as the consoler in chief.
“His job isn’t just to be well-meaning, his job is to perform.”
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It is up to Obama — who favors an assault-weapons ban but has done little to urge Congress to take it up — to take charge, he said.
“It’s time for the president, I think, to stand up and lead and tell this country what we should do — not go to Congress and say, ‘What do you guys want to do?’ ” he said.
Specifically, he said Obama should issue an executive order to make the Department of Justice aggressively prosecute gun buyers who lie on background-check forms.
He also questioned why Obama didn’t follow through on a 2008 campaign pledge to reintroduce the assault-weapons ban.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) vowed on “Meet the Press” to reintroduce the bill in the next year to ban assault weapons — like the .223-caliber AR-15 used in the Newtown massacre.
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The law, which Feinstein championed in 1994, expired in 2004. She called for a similar measure, but didn’t follow through, after a gunman wounded then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six in Arizona in 2011.
“There will be a bill,” she said. “It will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession [of assault weapons]. Not retroactively, but prospectively. It will ban the same for big clips, drums or strips of more than 10 bullets.”
Sen. Charles Schumer supports it and called for reforms to make it harder for mentally unstable people to get guns.
Gun-control opponents kept out of the spotlight yesterday, except for Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), who said on “Fox News Sunday” that Dawn Hochsprung, the principal killed lunging at the school gunman, should’ve been armed.
“I wish to God she had had an M-4 in her office locked up, and so when she heard gunshots . . . she takes his head off before he can hurt those kids.”