WASHINGTON — Mayor Bloomberg has hit a nerve in Arkansas.
A $350,000 TV ad blitz by Bloomberg’s gun-control group attacking Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor set off the Democrat, who yesterday aired his own spot firing back against Hizzoner.
“The mayor of New York City is running ads against me because I oppose President Obama’s gun-control legislation,” Pryor says in a TV ad that’s running in Arkansas.
“Nothing in the Obama plan would have prevented tragedies like Newtown, Aurora, Tucson or even Jonesboro,” he says, including a reference to the 1998 school shooting that killed five in Jonesboro, Ark.
“I’m committed to finding real solutions to gun violence while protecting our Second Amendment rights,” Pryor adds.
It isn’t the only backlash against Bloomberg for pushing his national gun-control agenda through Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the organization he founded and which he bankrolls with millions of dollars from his personal fortune.
The mayor’s gun-control efforts were also the apparent motive behind letters sent to him and his group that were laced with the poison ricin.
But Bloomberg isn’t backing down from the gun fight.
“We’re not going to walk away from those efforts,” he said on his weekly WOR Radio show, brushing off threats.“I’ve got more danger from lightning than from anything else and I’ll go about my business,” he said.
Pryor, a two-term incumbent who is considered the most vulnerable Senate Democrat in the 2014 election cycle, struck an independent note and cast himself as anti-Washington in his new TV ad.
“No one in Washington tells me what to do,” he says. “I listen to Arkansas.”