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So he kept his campaign promises. Good.

I think his previous positions on guns were frankly a combination of having spent his entire life in NYC and never really been exposed to a pro-2A way of thinking and living, and the political reality that only politicians promoting an anti-2A stance had any chance at all of getting elected. Not exactly big motivation for a politician to undertake a major re-examination of his beliefs on the issue. Now that he’s moving beyond NYC, he’s being exposed to pro-2A thinking and also has motivation to undertake a serious re-examination of his beliefs on this issue. I think he’s really changing his views to a considerable extent, beginning to realize how different reality is in non-urban areas, and how impossible/ineffective/unconstitutional it is to have one set of laws in the cities and another set everywhere else.

He was faced with a huge crime problem when he became mayor and was in no position to change the rulings of the Federal and NYS courts, which make it next to impossible to keep criminals off the streets. And those same courts had been routinely upholding all sorts of gun control laws. He had to use the tools he had available to him to make a serious dent in the crime situation, and he was quite successful in reversing the steady increase in crime that had developed under his predecessors.

I’m not necessarily a Rudy-for-President cheeleader. He’d be a heck of a lot better than Hillary/Edwards/Obama, and I won’t be miserable if he gets elected. On balance, though, I favor Romney out of the current crop of serious contenders, mainly because he has a track record of major success in both the private and public sectors (the Salt Lake Olympics being for all practical purposes a public sector enterprise). Rudy is entirely a public sector creature, and less likely to take actions that will tend to reduce the size of government. Intellectually, he understands the concept, and I think believes in it, but he simply has no practical experience in getting big things done through private sector activity, and thus has only a vague sense of what the private sector can do and how.

He was faced with a huge crime problem when he became mayor and was in no position to change the rulings of the Federal and NYS courts, which make it next to impossible to keep criminals off the streets. And those same courts had been routinely upholding all sorts of gun control laws. He had to use the tools he had available to him to make a serious dent in the crime situation, and he was quite successful in reversing the steady increase in crime that had developed under his predecessors.

First of all, do you really think that gun control works? That his use of the gun control laws were what lowered crime in NYC?

Second of all, just because a judge might uphold a law does not mean that the mayor is forced to use it. I'm not willing to let Rudy off the hook for suing gun companies quite that easily.