It’s no deep secret that anti-gun billionaire Mike Bloomberg will do anything, and at any cost, to promote his agenda of eradicating the Second Amendment. He launched an anti-gun organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, then rebranded it as Everytown for Gun Safety—likely to sound more relatable to those who are not billionaire politicians—when he absorbed another gun control group, Moms Demand Action, under the Everytown banner. Bloomberg seems determined to control the field of gun-ban advocacy.
He has also financed an online course on anti-gun advocacy, disparaged the heroic actions of lawfully armed citizens who saved lives, and even funds his own “media” outlet designed to deceive and mislead the public on firearm-related topics.
But Bloomberg has really made a name for himself with his willingness to spend unreal amounts of money on promoting anti-gun candidates on the ballot. Most famously, he burned through the equivalent of countless not-so-small fortunes, around one billion dollars, with his epically disastrous presidential campaign.
Besides losing the Democrat nomination to Joe Biden in 2020 in his historically costly vanity project, Bloomberg has distributed unprecedented millions into the coffers of countless anti-gun politicians. At times, he has been successful, like in 2019, when he spent millions—money sometimes spent on outright lies—to purchase control of the Virginia General Assembly to promote his New York City gun ban agenda in the Old Dominion.
Thankfully, Virginia’s pro-Second Amendment community learned from 2019, so when Bloomberg spent even more money in an attempt to tighten his New York grip on a southern state, he came up short.
Nonetheless, Bloomberg still has plenty to spend to elect anti-gun politicians, and his win-at-any-cost approach to pushing attacks on the Second Amendment does not rely solely on the billions in his bank account.
He also tries to hide his anti-gun intentions, or co-op other agendas, when it suits his needs.
As we have seen in the past, the organizations he finances may publicly claim to focus on gun control, but they frequently stray far from firearms when it comes to trying to elect anti-gun candidates. During the 2020 election cycle, Bloomberg’s Everytown went after candidates it wanted to see defeated by questioning their positions on a variety of issues completely unrelated to firearms, such as health care, pharmaceuticals, and public school funding.
The group also downplayed any mention of firearms in some key US Senate races that year, attempting to rebrand themselves, at least temporarily, as generic good governance advocates, railing against lobbyists, special interests, and the influence of money in politics.
Who knew Everytown was so self-loathing?
This year, we are seeing new ways in which Bloomberg and his anti-gun organization are attempting to expand their influence on the electorate. In Wisconsin, there will be an election on April 4 to fill a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court vacated by a retiring justice. In that race, Bloomberg’s Everytown announced it will spend $500,000.00 in opposition to one candidate, Daniel Kelly, and the ad that the group has launched spends as much time, if not more, talking about Kelly’s position on abortion as it does his position on guns.
To make matter worse, the messaging on Kelly’s positions on guns is misleading, at best; an outright lie, at worst.
The ad claims Kelly “wrote the court decision making it easier for dangerous people to carry guns in public.” But the decision to which the ad presumably refers was a case involving preemption, and whether a local transit authority could ban the carrying of firearms on city buses by law-abiding citizens who have a permit to carry a concealed firearm.
Wisconsin’s concealed carry statute gives only the state the authority to determine who may lawfully carry a concealed firearm, and where those with permits may or may not carry their firearms. The City of Madison’s transit authority had prohibited “weapons” on buses since 2005, but when Wisconsin enacted Act 35 in 2011 to establish its concealed carry permit law—which did not prohibit carrying firearms on public transportation, nor allow for local governments or the agencies that serve under them to prohibit it—the Madison transit authority did not change its rule.
A lawsuit ensued, the transit authority lost, and Daniel Kelly, who was serving on the Wisconsin Supreme Court at the time, wrote the 5-2 majority opinion.
In other words, either Everytown is lying about the opinion “making it easier for dangerous people to carry guns in public”—as the opinion did not make the issuing standards for obtaining a carry permit any less restrictive or change any aspects of the application process, as such a statement implies—or Everytown simply thinks anyone with a Wisconsin carry permit is “dangerous.”
It has always been obvious that anti-gun extremists will freely distort the positions candidates take on firearm-related policy, as well as regularly lie about the same. But what Everytown has made clear over several election cycles is that their extreme positions on gun control are so unpopular with voters that they have to engage in political advertising wholly unrelated to their mission.