Sunlight Foundation – by Nancy Watzman
As Vice President Joe Biden convenes a meeting of anti-gun groups today, some of them appear to be ginning up an ad campaign to demand greater regulation of firearms following last month’s mass shooting of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.
- Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund, the group backed by New York CIty Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, is on the air with ads in Colorado and Wisconsin, Federal Election Commission filings captured by Political Ad Sleuth show. The mayors’ group also has run advertising in Washington — presumably aimed at members of Congress — as well as other locations where mass shootings have occurred.
- Meanwhile, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence recently released new public service announcements featuring celebrities such as Mandy Potemkin, Mark Ruffalo, and Rosanne Cash on the web. However a version of the ad, captured by Sunlight’s Ad Hawk and shown above clocks at a made-for-TV 30 seconds. Sunlight has contacted the Brady Campaign about its plans but has not heard back by the time of this posting.
The new 30-second ad from Mayors Against Illegal Guns features Roxanna Green, mother of nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, who was killed along with five others in the shooting in Tucson, Ariz. two years ago where former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was injured. It refers viewers to the group’s website, DemandAPlan.org which urges lawmakers to strengthen criminal background check laws, ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, and to make gun trafficking a federal crime.
The group said it would air the ad in Tucson at 10 a.m. on the anniversary of the shootings, which was yesterday; however, because Tucson doesn’t fall in one of the top 50 media markets in the country, stations there are exempted from reporting ad buys to the FCC.
The FCC records show ads airing in Denver; however, the amounts reported are not large: just $1,075 for ads on the ABC affiliate. The state legislature, due back in session today, is going to be considering numerous gun-related bills following the shooting in an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre last summer. A pro-gun rally is planned outside the Capitol building this afternoon.
Reported ad buys in Wisconsin, where a mass shooting took place in a Sikh temple last summer, amounted to just $325. A query to Mayors Against Illegal Guns about the size of the ad buys was not returned by the time of this post. The nonprofit group spent $175,592 on issue ads during the 2012 election cycle.
So far, Sunlight’s trackers have not picked up any ads from pro-gun groups, but the amounts spent so far by the anti-gun lobby pales by comparision to the millions that the leading gun-rights lobby, the National Rifle Association, has spent on campaign donations and lobbying in the last three decades.
http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/new-anti-gun-ads/
I want to know why there has been no follow up on that Robbie Parker guy. He obviously gave a performance in Newtown which could not have possibly been real, there are many questions relating to the public picture of his daughters and family, and there is a definite question about how the same unfornunate little girl showed up laughing with Obama.
Where is the research, either MSM or alternative news? Why has this guy gone unchallenged? Why isn’t he being shadowed to see what is going on?
He’s a key to Newtown. Find him and expose him!
I agree. What the hell is going on? Why aren’t more people researching this and exposing the truth in the alternative media? Where are the alternative news outlets in Conn. and why haven’t they done anything about it?
We are better than this…
Better than letting some actors who live in luxury tell us how to run our country.
Go back to hollywood and chat with people who care what you think, because the rest of us don’t.
No it is about power and a total power over the people.
Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step to their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.
So, do not fall for the false promises and do not extinguish the light that is left to allow humanity a measure of self respect.
Exactly.
Without THEIR guns, they’d be forced to club us into submission.
They simply don’t have the numbers.