Mike Bloomberg takes his money local

Michael Bloomberg’s $40 million spending splurge on politics for this year’s election taught him a lesson for 2016: You get a much better bang for your buck by trying to tip state and local elections than high-profile federal ones.

So as the former New York mayor turned activist for gun control, healthier food choices, education reform, and other issues makes his spending plans for the next two years, he plans to weight his contributions more toward ballot measures, governor and school-board candidates, and away from House and Senate races, which have become glutted with outside money.

“You can keep hitting your head against a wall, or you can go elsewhere,” Bloomberg said in a statement to POLITICO. “Change is really possible at the state and local level.”

—he was already in the Nevada election and apparently financed the signature gathering for the upcoming referendum on “background checks”—

I read that they had collected 250,000 signatures where they only needed about 125,000, so I believe it's a done deal that it will be on the ballot.

The NRA and other pro-gun organizations are going to have to go pro-active on this "background check" business or we will be picked off state by state. I practically lived on the various newspaper comments sections up in Washington, trying to get our point across: The people were being lied to and manipulated, i.e. There is no "loophole" (backed up with quotes from the 1968 GCA) and it is a registration scheme in disguise (typical liberal trick).

Unfortunately, non-gun owners didn't give a damn. All they could see is how "reasonable" it was, ignoring the Form 4473 connection. That, or the "it would make us safer" meme. They will use the same successful arguments in Nevada.

Our side is going to have to offer a background check that ONLY checks the buyer, via a drivers license or some recognized photo ID. I don't know if such a mechanism even exists, but if not we should set one up. We have a more rational (hopefully) political climate in D.C. now, so maybe that part can be handled there. Sitting around and only making arguments against this background check scam is not going to work. We need our own competing version to cut the ground out from under them.

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