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.

Camp David

President John F. Kennedy shot skeet at Camp David, shown here with David Niven and The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee in 1963. Camp David Photo.President John F. Kennedy shot skeet at Camp David, shown here with David Niven and The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee in 1963.

President Barack Obama, seeking a ban on assault weapons, says he shoots skeet “all the time” at Camp David.

Obama told The New Republic magazine in an interview that at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s wooded Catoctin Mountains “we do skeet shooting all the time.”

“Not the girls, but oftentimes guests of mine go up there” to shoot skeet, Obama added in an interview published in the magazine’s Feb. 11 issue.

President Dwight Eisenhower, who had the good sense to rename the presidential retreat for grandson David — it had been known as Shangri-La before then — installed the skeet shooting range in the 1950s.

Obama, father of two daughters, mentioned his interest in skeet shooting in response to a question on whether he had ever fired a gun.

Obama has responded to a shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school last month by proposing legislation to mandate background checks for all gun buyers, ban high-capacity ammunition clips and reinstate a ban on sales of assault weapons. Obama also signed 23 executive actions aimed at circumventing congressional opposition to new gun restrictions, including several designed to maximize prosecution of gun crimes and improve access to government data for background checks.

Twenty students and six educators were killed in a mass shooting Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Skeet shooting involves shotguns, not Bushmasters. And there are no mega-clips involved.

The president also expressed concern about violence and injuries in professional and intercollegiate football in this interview, saying he would “think long and hard” if he had a son before allowing him to play. Obama, an avowed sports fan, says the National Collegiate Athletic Association in particular should consider rules changes in view of emerging evidence on long-term health consequences of head blows suffered by players.

He said he is “more worried” about amateur college players than professional National Football League players who are “grown men” represented by a union and paid a salary.

“You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on,” Obama said in the interview. “That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.”

Obama predicted that football rules will “probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence.” He said the while rules changes to tamp down violence “may make it a little bit less exciting,” the result “will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.”

Original post is Obama Shoots Skeet at Camp David — and Has Advice for the NCAA by Political Capital.