Photograph by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., waves as she ends her speech at the 40th annual Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on March 15, 2013.

Written with Jonathan Salant

Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire says opponents “can’t bully me into changing my vote” on background checks for gun buyers.

The opponents in this case, she says, are New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama. The mayor, co-founder of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News, is among the mayors in Mayors Against Illegal Guns who announced a new TV ad this week targeting Ayotte for her vote against the background check bill that died in the Senate for lack of 60 votes.

In doing so, the mayors say, Ayotte voted against the 89 percent of New Hampshire voters who support the measure. Ayotte has been singled out more than any of the other Republican opponents of the measure because of where she lives, a swing state that is sympathetic to Democratic causes.

Ayotte says the legislation she opposed, which would require purchasers at gun shows and over the Internet to undergo the same criminal background checks as those buying weapons from licensed firearm dealers, would do “nothing to prevent a deranged individual from obtaining and misusing firearms to commit horrific tragedies like the one in Newtown.”

Original post is Ayotte in Crossfire: ‘Can’t Bully Me’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images

The King College Prep band plays as the hearse carrying the body of Hadiya Pendleton arrives at Cedar Park Cemetery in Riverdale, Illinois, on February 9, 2013.

The tragedy of the narrative is breathtaking.

The pragmatism of the political calculation is sobering:

Hadiya Pendleton, 15, performed with her Chicago high school band at President Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration.

She was gunned down in Chicago a week later.

First Lady Michelle Obama attended the girl’s funeral.

The girl’s parents attended the president’s State of the Union address last week, seated alongside the first lady as the president closed with an appeal to the joint session of Congress to at least vote on the gun-safety measures before them — in honor of  Pendleton, the 20 children killed by a gunman in Newtown, Connecticut, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and many other victims of gun violence.

Now Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, the girl’s mother, appears in a TV ad sponsored by Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

The mother recalls her daughter’s inaugural parade appearance as “the happiest day of her life.”

As Congress debates the nation’s gun laws, she says in the mayors’ newest ad, Congress can start with background checks for all gun purchases “so no more innocent children are killed and no parent has to go through this heartbreak.”

Of course, universal gun background checks for legal gun purchases won’t ensure that no more innocent children are killed. Yet the additional measures that Congress could consider, such as a ban on assault-styled weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, appear mired in the politics of the Second Amendment and pressure of the gun lobby, lacking the votes needed in either chamber of Congress.

The mayors’ campaign, which includes as co-chairman New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News, has focused on the families who have suffered — an earlier ad featuring the mother of a girl killed in the Tuscon shootings that seriously wounded Giffords, another featuring several parents saying, “Enough is enough.”

In pressing for background checks, the mayors may also be confronting the politics of the possible.

As Bloomberg’s Heidi Przybyla reported,  “a coalition of House Republicans is willing to thwart the National Rifle Association’s opposition to broadening background checks for U.S. gun purchases. That may be Obama’s best chance for advancing tougher gun regulations this year.”

Original post is Mayors Take Aim at the Possible: Background Checks for Gun-Buyers by Political Capital.

There is no higher-priced ad than a Super Bowl commercial.

And there is no higher-stakes fight than the one that the nation’s mayors are waging against the National Rifle Association.

In the truest tradition of opposition research, the mayors’ “Demand A Plan” campaign has fielded a third-quarter ad in Super Bowl XLVII that places the words of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre deep in his own end zone.

In a May 1999 congressional hearing, LaPierre listed the gun measures that his organization found “reasonable.”

“We think it ‘s reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone,” LaPierre told Congress in 1999, and that testimony is replayed in the ad aired by Mayors Against Illegal Guns – though, now, the NRA is calling more pervasive background checks no solution to  gun violence.

Background checks for all gun-buyers, including those at gun shows as well as those at retail stores, is the one measure that draws almost universal support in opinion polling. The mayors’ ad would appear to be a high-priced calculation that, for whatever happens with assault weapons or mega-ammunition clips in the Capitol Hill gun-control debate, there is one measure that the NRA, representing gun owners and manufacturers, cannot stop.

The ad is built around children,  in the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting that claimed the lives of 20 first-graders. “America can do this for us,” says one child in the ad, picturing children at play. “Please.”

Original post is Mayors’ Super Bowl Gun-Control Ad: Hail Mary Against the NRA’s Defense by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ida Mae Astute/ABC via Getty Images

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically injured two years ago when a gunman opened fired in Tucson, Arizona, and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly talk to Diane Sawyer about the need for changes in gun control laws and greater awareness of mental health issues on Jan. 5, 2013 in New York City.

Two years after the Tucson, Arizona, shootings that critically injured former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, she and her husband are adding their voices to a movement for gun control.

Big-city mayors are marking the anniversary with a TV ad tailored for the Washington market and communities that have suffered mass shootings featuring the mother of a 9-year-old girl killed in the Tucson shootings.

“Enough,” Giffords says in an interview on  ABC”s “World News with Diane Sawyer” airing tonight.

“After the shooting in Tucson, there was talk about addressing some of these issues, [and] again after [a movie theater massacre in] Aurora,” Colorado, her husband Mark Kelly, the astronaut, says in an interview also following the Dec. 14 killings of 20 young schoolchildren and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut. “I’m hopeful that this time is different, and I think it is. Twenty first-graders’ being murdered in their classrooms is a very personal thing for everybody.”

Gifffords and Kelly visited Newtown to meet with families of the victims.

The “first couple that we spoke to, the dad took out his cell phone and showed us a picture of his daughter and I just about lost it, just by looking at the picture,” Kelly says in the interview, excerpts released by ABC. “It was just very tough and it brought back a lot of memories about what that was like for us some two years ago.”

Giffords and Kelly are proposing “common sense” changes through “Americans for Responsible Solutions.”  They propose a comprehensive background check for the private sale of firearms and controls on large magazines of ammunition.

Jared Loughner, the accused shooter in Tucson, used a magazine with 33 rounds. Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter who also  killed his mother and himself, used numerous 30-round magazines in a Bushmaster AR-15.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns today released a new TV ad featuring Roxanna Green, mother of Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old killed in Tucson. It opens with a scene from the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. In the ad, Green demands that elected officials in Washington take immediate action to curb gun violence in America.

“I have one question for our political leaders,” Green says in the ad. “When will you find the courage to stand up to the gun lobby?  Whose child has to die next?”

The ad is airing on Washington, DC, cable through Jan. 14, the group says, and in markets where there have been mass shootings:  Tucson, Waco, Texas, Roanoke, Denver, Binghamton, N.Y., and Milwaukee.

“How many more children must die before Washington does something to end our gun violence problem?” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chair of the mayors’ group and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, says in a statement accompanying the ad’s release.

“Roxanna Green knows all too well the pain of losing a loved one gun violence – sadly, there are parents and siblings and friends who learn this every day in our country,” says co-chair Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston. “It’s time for Washington to act to reduce gun violence — for the 33 Americans that are killed every day and for all of our children.”

President Barack Obama has charged Vice President Joe Biden with assembling an agenda for legislative action following the Newtown shootings, asking for those goals by the end of this month.

The National Rifle Association has proposed stationing an armed guard at every school.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president, urging Congress after the Newtown shootings  “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”

“I bought a gun at Walmart recently and I went through a background check,” Kelly says in the ABC interview. “”Why can’t we just do that and make it more difficult for criminals and the mentally ill to get guns?”

Giffords has undergone a long and arduous recovery aided by physical therapy, speech therapy and yoga. She has been able to ride a horse and is preparing for a tandem bicycle ride with her husband, a space shuttle pilot. She plans to apply the same resolve toward the mission of gun control, Kelly says. “Gabby works very hard in her rehab,” he says. “Now we intend to work very hard on this new project.”

Original post is Tucson Two Years Later, Newtown: `Whose Child Has to Die Next?’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Julio Cortez/AP Photo

Newark Mayor Cory Booker leaps from a mobile billboard during part of the FixGunChecks.org truck tour stop.

Donors funding many of the current political ads that boost or attack candidates are being kept under wraps. But a group sponsoring a new ad campaign calling for gun-control plans from President Obama and Mitt Romney has opted for disclosure.

A report to the Federal Election Commission lists nearly $3.4 million in donations to the ad sponsor — Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

The Aug. 6 FEC filing was the first report in months to list new “electioneering communications” — pre-election TV and radio ads that refer to candidates. This kind of report had stopped coming into the FEC since a federal court ruled in March that groups sponsoring electioneering communications must disclose their donors.

The FEC report filed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns revealed that the group got most of its money from New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who gave more than $3.1 million between January 2011 and July 2012. Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LLP, the parent company of Bloomberg BNA and Bloomberg.com, is co-chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, along with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. The report listed a total of nearly $133,000 in spending for recent ads aired on Washington, D.C., broadcast stations and national cable networks.

Several other groups have made changes to their ads to avoid disclosing donors since the March ruling in Van Hollen v. FEC, brought by Rep. Christopher Van Hollen (D-Md.) and campaign reform groups. Groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity, which have aired millions of dollars worth of political ads since March, have switched to “independent-expenditure” ads, which directly call for votes for or against candidates. This type of message was not affected by the court decision, meaning that ads supporting or opposing candidates now are subject to a lower disclosure threshold than ads that focus on issues and do not advocate for votes.

Referencing the recent shooting incidents in Colorado and Wisconsin, the ads by Mayors Against Illegal Guns featured victims wounded in the 2011 shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and more than a dozen others in Tucson, Ariz, and call on viewers to “demand a plan” from Obama and Romney to deal with gun violence. In a statement regarding the latest ad campaign, Bloomberg said: “Every day that goes by without action, 34 more people will be murdered with guns. The people who want to run this country need to tell us their plans to stop the bloodshed.”

Original post is Gun-Control Group Files FEC Report Listing Donors by Political Capital.