Gun Politics New York

Mayor Mike is going to start grading politicians:

“… Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the nonprofit group financed by Bloomberg (I), will unveil a scoring system Tuesday to award lawmakers grades of A through F, much like the National Rifle Association, which has derived much of its power by deploying letter rankings against politicians at election time … “For decades, the NRA has done an admirable job of tracking to minute detail how members of Congress stand on gun bills.  We’ve simply decided to do the same,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns … Glaze outlined a sophisticated algorithm that would weigh lawmakers’ votes on gun bills as well as their public statements and other actions to issue overall letter grades.   “Not every member can vote for every bill, but if not, there are other things they can and should be doing, and we will have our eye out for those as well,” Glaze said … “The appetite for information about where members are is very high,” Glaze said. Of the scorecard, he added: “We don’t intend that this will be a tree falling in the forest.  We intend for people to have all the information they need to make sound voting and political-contribution decisions.” …”

This is going to fail for one simple reason: NRA has an actual voting constituency which cares about the issue.  That is why their grades mean something to politicians.  MAIG is just astroturf funded almost entirely by one person: Bloomberg himself.

Plus, antis who agree with Bloomberg can already use NRA’s grades to make choices.  That hasn’t worked because even people who don’t like guns or who don’t like the NRA do not care enough about the issue to vote based on it.  There is a reason that groups like the Brady Campaign and New Yorkers Against Gun Violence have largely given up trying to influence elections: they can’t.

You never know what you’ll find at a gun show. Case in point:

Last week it was announced that Cuomo’s cronies had created their own gun control group.  This week it was announced that they will be running ads in the state:

“The state Democratic Committee announced today it will be promoting its agenda — and one backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo — through ads and mobilization efforts in New York and the nation … The party said in a news release that it is setting up committees on the issues of … gun safety …  A Democratic official clarified that while the effort will promote national issues, the effort will only be in New York and the ads will only run in the state.  The effort will also promote Cuomo’s agenda back home, including gun control … The first ad campaign will focus on gun violence and feature Sarah and Jim Brady calling on Washington to pass comprehensive gun legislation …”

I’m having trouble deciding which is the dumber idea: Trying to promote an agenda that caused a huge drop in the Governor’s popularity or digging up these two fossils to use as mouthpieces for that agenda.

It’s almost as if Cuomo is stuck in the early 90s, when gun control and the Brady’s were de rigueur amongst the Democrat elite.  Even a cursory glance at the political landscape would show that a lot has changed over the last 20 years.  From a purely political standpoint, gun control is not a winning issue with the public and no group has the ability to deliver any money/manpower/votes to supportive candidates at election time.  I don’t even see the gun control groups talking much about elections anymore.  Is Cuomo really that out of touch that he does not see this?