In a closed-door meeting with a group of Democrat mayors and Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday at the White House, the president promised to take more executive actions to reduce gun violence.
Mr. Obama “vowed to continue doing everything in his power to combat gun violence through executive action and to press Congress to pass common-sense reforms like expanding the background check system and cracking down on gun trafficking,” the White House said in a statement.
Attending the meeting were members of NY Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns – Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, N.J., a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate; Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter; Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Gray; New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu; Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, Calif.; Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, Mo.; Mayor Molly Ward of Hampton, Va., and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.
The NRA rejects the idea that “expanding a broken background check system will make anyone safer” and lobbied Congress last Spring to support the NICS Reporting Improvement Act of 2013, introduced by Senators Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Mark Begich, D-Alaska.
This bill, unlike the false notion of “universal background checks,” will improve the current national instant background check system (NICS) by improving the records within it.
We know that NICS needs improvement. The Graham-Begich bill helps fix NICS by clearly spelling out the definition of who is a danger to themselves or others and should not have access to firearms, while protecting the rights of law abiding citizens.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s inaptly named group Mayor’s Against Illegal Guns has been shedding members in recent months according to the New York Post:
Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun club suddenly isn’t such a hot ticket.
His gun-control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns has lost more than 50 of its original mayoral members in the last few months, as disenchanted mayors quit the coalition or leave office.
Bloomberg, who pumped millions of dollars of his personal fortune into the group to make it one of the loudest voices in the gun-control debate, now is struggling to replace ex-members.“The original focus, I thought, was going to be on better enforcement of our existing laws, and if anything, we have talked about not getting involved with things like banning assault weapons and banning magazine clips,” former member Rockford (Ill.) Mayor Lawrence Morrissey told BuzzFeed, which first reported the dwindling membership.
Morrissey received rousing applause at a town hall meeting last month when he announced he was quitting Bloomberg’s group.
“The reason why I joined the group in the first place is because I took the name for what it said — against ‘illegal’ guns,” he told the crowd.
Mayors Against Illegal Guns has focused almost exclusively on banning weapons and other tough new gun-control measures.
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