The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety political arm will spend “at least $1 million to help Democrats try to gain control of the Pennsylvania legislature in the November elections.”
It’s part of a nationwide effort to flip state legislatures to Democrats in an effort to press the Bloomberg/Everytown gun control agenda.
Charlie Kelly, senior political adviser for Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund, said in an interview, “We see Pennsylvania as one of the most important battleground states for gun safety in 2020…After yet another year without action on gun safety, I think that the Pennsylvania state House and state Senate are absolutely in play.”
But the term “gun safety” is what gun rights activists call “camo-speak” which translates to gun control.
Efforts like this push Second Amendment activists into the Republican camp.
Gun control apparently doesn’t excite most voters the way it apparently does people at Everytown, however.
Writing at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Brooklyn, N.Y. –based freelancer Kim Kelly went after presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden for his gun control agenda. Pointing to Biden’s lackluster proposals on the environment and health care, Kelly said his anti-gun stance is getting attention, probably the wrong kind.
“But Biden did shake the table in a different way in 2019 when he debuted his gun control platform,” Kelly wrote. “Later that year, when he bumbled into a heated exchange with a Detroit factory worker, who accused him of trying to ‘take away our guns,’ right-wingers and gun rights groups gloated over the spectacle. But even now, after the world has changed several times over, it’s still hard to shake the feeling that that worker was right. To the dismay of firearm enthusiasts on the left, Biden is still coming for some people’s guns. It’s now just a matter of who’s going to have them snatched — and who isn’t.”
And that appears to be the proverbial $64 question. The answer, according to Kelly, points to citizens with low incomes and meager bank accounts.
Noting how Biden wants to treat modern semiautomatic sporting rifles the same way machine guns are treated—requiring a special tax of $200—Kelly observes: “Regardless of one’s opinion on guns and gun control, it is obvious that this proposal will disproportionately affect poor and working-class communities. Those within those communities who already own firearms would be robbed of their ability to protect themselves and their loved ones, while their wealthier counterparts would skate by on their ready piles of cash. Stephen Paddock perpetrated one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history and could afford dozens of high-powered weapons and a plush Las Vegas hotel suite; this plan would have no effect on someone like him. In effect, Biden’s plan sets in motion a ‘war on guns,’ the same way his predecessors declared wars on ‘poverty,’ ‘crime’ and ‘terror’ — wars in which it was inevitably black and brown people who were the real targets.”
Whether the public likes it or not, the billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobby is determined to push their agenda, regardless who it affects the most.
