Mayors Against Illegal Guns To Spend $12 Millon for Comprehensive Background Checks

A group of mayors, with New York’s Michael Bloomberg at the helm, is set to spend $12 million on TV ads in a move designed to convince Senators that the country needs stronger gun control.

“The time has come to end gun violence,” says a campaign tag line on the Mayors Against Illegal Guns web site, and calls for a “comprehensive strategy” to curb gun related crime.

“These ads bring the voices of Americans — who overwhelmingly support comprehensive and enforceable background checks — into the discussion to move senators to immediately take action to prevent gun violence,” Bloomberg said in a statement issued by the group he co-founded in 2006.

The two ads posted on the group’s website, called “Responsible” and “Family,” show a gun owner holding a rifle while sitting on the back of a pickup truck.

In one ad, the man says he’ll defend the Second Amendment but adds “with rights come responsibilities.” The ad then urges viewers to tell Congress to support background checks.

In the other ad, the man, a hunter, says “background checks have nothing to do with taking guns away from anyone.” The man then says closing loopholes will stop criminals and the mentally ill from obtaining weapons.

AP

Though proponents of strict background checks and an end to FTF, or face-to-face transfers, often claim registration does not signify an intent to seize weapons, warnings from gun owners in Canada and Australia suggest otherwise. Once registered, argue privacy advocates, government can easily issue laws to seize weapons directly from private owners, and know exactly where to go to get them.

As Paul Joseph Watson notes in a recent report,registration of firearms often precedes confiscation.

The US Congress is set to take up Federal legislation governing new firearms restrictions next month, though efforts from America’s gun owners have pressured most Senators and Representatives to abandon their plans to ban what they call “assault weapons,” more commonly known as semi-automatic firearms, and “high capacity” magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

The Mayors have a mission against illegal guns, but laws on State and Federal registers already punish individuals who illegally own weapons or restricted weapons without a license. Thus it seems clear that the intent of the new campaign is to pass restrictive legislation to first make guns illegal, and then punish owners of those newly classified weapons.