Gubs for the day

The New York Times has a political blog post by Robert Pear about gubs:

The chief executive of the National Rifle Association said that his organization would lead a national campaign against efforts by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City to persuade Congress to adopt stricter gun controls.
The mayor and the rifle association executive, Wayne LaPierre, appeared separately on the NBC News program Meet the Press. Bloomberg, a billionaire and a registered independent, said he was spending twelve million dollars on advertising in support of pending federal legislation to curb gun violence. In reply, LaPierre said: “He can’t buy America. He can’t spend enough of his $27 billion to try to impose his will on the American public.” Referring to Bloomberg’s well-known campaigns against smoking and junk food, he said: “They don’t want him in their restaurants, they don’t want him in their homes, they don’t want him telling them what food to eat. They sure don’t want him telling what self-defense firearms to own.’’
Bloomberg formed a super PAC last year to donate to candidates and causes that he supports. The causes include gay rights and tougher gun laws.
LaPierre said that gun owners would make up a political counterweight to the mayor. "We have people all over, millions of people, sending us $5, $10, $15, $20 checks, saying, ‘Stand up to this guy that says we can only have three bullets,’ which is what he said," LaPierre said. “‘Stand up to this guy that says ridiculous things like the N.R.A. wants firearms with nukes on them.’ I mean, it’s insane, the stuff he says."
Bloomberg said the NRA’s power was “vastly overrated". Moreover, he said he was “cautiously optimistic’’ that Congress would follow public opinion and vote for stricter gun controls. The Senate is expected to begin debate on gun legislation next month after it returns from a two-week break for the Easter and Passover holidays.
“Ninety percent of the public, eighty percent of NRA members even, say that they think we should have reasonable checks before people are allowed to buy guns," Bloomberg said. “They all support the Second Amendment, as I do. There are an awful lot of people that think that this is one of the great issues of our times. We have to stop the carnage.’’
And he had a warning for lawmakers who oppose stricter gun controls. “If ninety percent of the public want something and their representatives vote against that, common sense says they are going to have a price to pay for that," Bloomberg said. “We’re running ads around the country. We’ve got people manning phone banks and calling. We’re trying to do everything we can to impress upon the senators that this is what the survivors want, this is what the public wants.’’
The bill going to the Senate floor is expected to include enhanced background checks for gun buyers.
Asked if his lobbying efforts were thwarting the will of the American people, LaPierre said, “No, not at all.’’ He added: “The whole thing, universal checks, is a dishonest premise. There’s not a bill on the Hill that provides a universal check. Criminals aren’t going to be checked. They’re not going to do this. The shooters in Tucson, in Aurora, in Newtown, they’re not going to be checked. They’re unrecognizable.’’
LaPierre criticized the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine whether prospective buyers have criminal records or are otherwise ineligible to purchase guns. “It’s not fair, it’s not accurate, it’s not instant," LaPierre said. “The mental health records are not in the system, and they don’t prosecute any of the criminals that they catch. It’s a speed bump for the law-abiding. It slows down the law-abiding and does nothing to anybody else." LaPierre said gun control advocates “want to take this current mess of a system and expand it now to a hundred million law-abiding gun owners.’’
Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, predicted that the Senate would approve some kind of universal background check. But he said that Congress must recognize concerns that the federal government would keep and possibly misuse records of gun purchases. “I don’t know a Republican that doesn’t want to have significantly enhanced and universal background checks,” Coburn said on the C-Span program Newsmakers. “How you do that and protect the Second Amendment at the same time is very important. Remember”, Coburn said, “there are a lot of people in this country that— and rightly so, given the behavior of the Federal government, in terms of its fiscal capability, in terms of regulatory overreach, in terms of poking its nose into every area of everybody’s life, in terms of domestic drones, in terms of all this other stuff— that you’ve created a certain level of paranoia in this country, and some of it’s justified.”
Bloomberg said he hoped Congress would approve a ban on assault weapons, which appears to have little chance of being adopted. “I don’t think we should give up on the assault weapons ban,” Bloomberg said.
Governor John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Democrat, appearing on the CNN program State of the Union, said that a ban on assault weapons was “a tough sell”. Colorado recently adopted gun control bills that call for an expansion of background checks, and limits on the size of ammunition magazines. But the state Legislature did not ban assault weapons. “I think the feeling right now around assault weapons, at least in Colorado, is that they’re so hard to define what an assault weapon is,” Hickenlooper said.

Rico says it, like most of politics, is much ado about nothing...