Posted on 05/21/2007 9:30:45 PM PDT by neverdem
WASHINGTON — Rep. Todd Tiahrt is Mayor Bloomberg's bogeyman, the congressional embodiment of what the mayor says is a powerful lobby allowing illegal guns to flow onto the city's streets.
As part of his national campaign against illegal guns, Mr. Bloomberg has targeted Mr. Tiahrt aggressively, even running television ads in his Kansas district that tell voters that a law their congressman sponsored is helping criminals, not the police.
The veteran Republican lawmaker has stayed mostly quiet in the face of the onslaught, but now he is fighting back. In a 30-minute interview in his office last week, Mr. Tiahrt accused Mr. Bloomberg and his aides of negotiating in bad faith, and he says the famously nonpartisan mayor is putting politics over police safety.
"I think it's a self-serving effort to put a political agenda above the safety of our law enforcement officers," Mr. Tiahrt said.
The measure he has sponsored, known as the Tiahrt amendment, puts limits on the use of gun tracing data by law enforcement agencies and in civil litigation. City officials argue that it ties their hands in aggressively prosecuting gun crimes and getting illegal guns off the streets.
Mr. Tiahrt says the opposite is true.
Repealing the amendment, which has passed Congress each year since 2003, could endanger undercover police officers by making aspects of their investigations available to the public, he said.
"They could be, by looking at the trace data, ferreted out, or discerned, and that would place them in jeopardy as well," he said.
To city officials, Mr. Tiahrt's claims are beside the point. In the eyes of City Hall, the congressman is a foot soldier for the National Rifle Association and a spokesman for the gun industry. And to Mr. Tiahrt, Mr. Bloomberg is using a "passion for gun control" as...
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
Bloomberg ran into problems because of the scam he tried to pull on Virginia gunshops. I hope they sue him bigtime.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
This is all part of the marketing experts testing the waters for the Bloomberg run... they are trying to figure out how many voters with uber conservative congressmen are really that conservative.
Bloomberg called the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) a “fringe goup” for supporting the Tiahrt ammendment.
The Brand New and Same Old (Hillary Rodham Clinton)
FReepmail me if you want on or off my New York ping list.
Bloomberg is going to turn Tiahrt into a national figure. He’d be a hell of a veep.
“Bloomberg is a nut and the Republican Party needs to show him the door.”
I don’t think that the republican party ever asked Bloomberg in. My understanding of his genesis is that he was originally a democrat, but could not win the democratic primary in his run for New York mayor. No one was running on the republican side so he had put himself in to run on that side also and got the nod. He switched parties so he could run for mayor. He truly is a RINO.
WTF???
Not in MY country!
You misunderstood. Because of the scrutiny, Tiahrt will be elevated to a national figure. TIAHRT would be a hell of a Veep.
I'd need to learn more about Tiahrt.
Hes telegenic and has a great background. Not in this cycle obviously.
Thanks for the ping!
I think "hell" was the operative word...
Nope. If Bloomberg got elected POTUS, it would be time to dig the guns up.
Organize to fight gun crime
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/jackson/395313,CST-EDT-jesse22.article)
May 22, 2007
JESSE JACKSON jjackson@rainbowpush.org
We mourned the murder of Blair Holt on Friday at the House of Hope in Chicago. The 16-year-old died a hero, using his body to shield a friend as his crowded bus was shot up by what was apparently an enraged gang member.
Americans saw the horror at Virginia Tech, the worst mass murder in U.S. history, where 32 students died. But this country experiences a Virginia Tech every day, as an average of 32 people are murdered by gunfire. America’s cities — and particularly America’s poor neighborhoods — are terrorized by gun violence.
Our cities don’t manufacture guns. Most don’t allow gun dealers to operate inside the city limits. But our urban borders are even more porous than our national borders. Just outside Chicago, as outside many large cities, the dealers set up shop. There is no limit on the number of guns an individual can buy. And President Bush allowed the assault weapons ban to expire, so there is virtually no limit on the kind of guns that can be purchased.
Any big-city police chief will tell you the easy access to guns contributes directly to the death toll in our cities — and endangers the lives of the men and women who serve on the thin blue line of police.
Metropolitan areas — where most people live — have no use for gun peddlers, for people packing concealed weapons, for kids fighting gang wars with assault weapons. If given their choice, most citizens in cities and suburbs would simply ban handguns, ban assault weapons and ban gun shops and gun dealers. Hunters could buy their guns in the rural areas where they hunt.
Why are the warnings of police chiefs across the country ignored? The answer, largely, is that the gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, has been taken over by zealots and promises to punish politicians who want to get guns off our streets. The NRA doesn’t simply play defense. It has gone into statehouses to pass laws prohibiting metropolitan areas from enforcing their own gun bans, and to make licensing easy for concealed weapons. The gun nuts’ answer to Virginia Tech is that students should pack concealed weapons.
Politicians quake before the NRA’s muscle. My own sense, however, is that the NRA is more swagger than actual swat. In 2000, they organized big time against Al Gore. But Gore won the popular vote. He won Michigan and Pennsylvania. Gun-control initiatives passed in Colorado and Oregon, both hunters’ states. The NRA lost the great bulk of the House and Senate races that it pumped the most money in. The NRA has a lot of money and makes a lot of noise, but its members have other concerns: Iraq, health care, the economy.
But the NRA is mobilized. The victims of gun violence are not. The gun dealers sell the guns; innocent people get shot; we mourn. But mourning isn’t enough. This will change only if the victims — the parents and the children, the police and the firefighters — organize. Americans should not have to live in fear of sitting on their porches, walking the streets or riding the buses. There must a victims’ rebellion. They must demand laws that protect them, and value and honor those laws.
The NRA wants guns on streets. The gun dealers profit from the sale. Guns are becoming a statement of manhood. The victims — and their friends, relatives and neighbors, police and firefighters — must demand real gun control. Gun control won’t end violence, but it will lower the casualties and help protect the innocent. It will make it harder for terrorists — foreign and homegrown — to buy guns in America. It will strengthen the porous borders of metropolitan areas against the gun peddlers who profit from selling guns to gangs. It might even allow us to celebrate the life of the next Blair Holt rather than mourn his death.
The Va. Attorney General has notified Mr. Bloomberg of this law and told him to keep his crappy people out of Va. effective then.
Good! I say that as a conservative from Northeastern NYS.
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