From the Washington Post, “Gabrielle Giffords, husband Mark Kelly launch anti-gun-violence group“:
“Mark Kelly woke up in the middle of the night in his hotel room in China and looked at his BlackBerry: Twenty children in Connecticut, all shot to death. He immediately called his wife thousands of miles away, Gabrielle Giffords. “I said to her, ‘Gabby, we can’t just put out a statement anymore,’ ” Kelly recounted in an interview Tuesday. “Twenty first-graders and their teachers, murdered in a classroom. If we just talk about it, things won’t change. We need to try and help.” With that, a couple who survived their own episode of gun violence decided to make themselves the new faces of the push to toughen the country’s gun laws. The astronaut and his wife — who as a Democratic congresswoman representing Arizona was shot in the head in 2011 outside a Tucson supermarket — announced on Tuesday, the second anniversary of the shooting, that they were forming their own political group to take on the powerful National Rifle Association …”
Where’s their money coming from?
“Steve and Amber Mostyn, wealthy Texas trial attorneys, said today that they are giving $1 million to help start the gun-control advocacy group formed by former Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly. Steve Mostyn, one of the top contributors to a super political action committee that helped President Barack Obama’s re-election effort, is listed as treasurer of Giffords’s new super-PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions. Mostyn said the group will have a nonprofit wing, which will be used to conduct a public education campaign …”
They’re going to fail for the same reason all antigun groups are failing: lack of real public support. This is yet another attempt on the part of wealthy professional activists and politicians to put up an eminence front in order to sell an unpopular agenda to the public. It is nothing but astroturf.
What these people simply refuse to accept is that gunnies political power comes not from money, but from ordinary citizens themselves. That is why gun sales are up and why applications for CCWs are up all across the country. The antis simply cannot match that.