WASHINGTON – A gun-rights leader Sunday blasted Mayor Bloomberg for planning to spend $25 million in next year’s elections to boost gun control, saying Americans reject his “arrogance of power.”
“I’m not sure the amount of money that billionaire Bloomberg has is going to be effective,” Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
He predicted a repeat of this year’s recall election in Colorado, where Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns spent $350,000 backing two gun-control lawmakers who still got booted from office.
“He outspent the candidates that won in Colorado enormously and he lost,” said Pratt. “So I think the message is, ‘We don’t like the arrogance of power. We don’t like the message that we ought to be disarmed as a way of fighting crime.”
“Mayor Bloomberg’s message is wrong and he’s going to continue to lose,” said Pratt.
The mayor’s spokesman responded by touting Hizzoner’s crime-fighting record.
“No lectures please about fighting crime,” said Deputy Press Secretary Kamran Mumtaz. “Under Mayor Bloomberg, New York City is America’s safest big city with murders at an all-time low – thanks to innovative, proactive policing and tough laws that get illegal guns and criminals off our streets.”
He said the mayor “helped fund campaigns that defeated eight NRA A-rated incumbents in the last two years and we expect more success next year.”
Gun-control activist Mark Kelly, husband of gun violence victim and former Arizona Rep. Gabby Gifford, vowed to overcome recent setbacks in the fight for tougher firearm laws.
“We know this is a tough fight [and] politics is a difficult business. We’re in this for the long haul and I’m confident that over time we are going to be successful,” Kelly, a former astronaut, said on the same show with Pratt.
Kelly and his wife co-founded Americans for Responsible Solutions, which reportedly is working with Bloomberg’s group to spend $25 million boosting gun control in the 2014 election cycle.
Pratt said that his group wasn’t satisfied with stopping the gun-control push by Kelly, Bloomberg, President Obama and others in the wake of the massacre a year ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
He called for a roll back of laws that prohibit guns in places like schools and make them “murder magnets.”
“The legislation that is on the books is lethal,” declared Pratt. “It is killing people. All of these gun-free zones are murder magnets, and we’ve simply got to get rid of them.”
“It’s an allusion to think that somehow we are going to safer because we can’t have a gun in a particular area, because the bad guy is going to have a gun,” he said.