Follow the Money:
Joyce Foundation Funds Bloomberg’s Anti-Gunners
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
The anti-gun Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston, MA, Mayor Tom Menino, has gotten $175,000 in financial support from the anti-gun Joyce Foundation.
According to the Joyce Foundation’s website, the contribution was made in November of last year “to help support the effort to organize the coalition of mayors, who are united in promoting national, state, and local policies and law enforcement strategies to reduce the flow of illegal guns into cities.”
At the same time, a source in Bloomberg’s office indicated to Gun Week that mayors belonging to the organization may be using staff in their own offices at times for work that may be related to their boss’ involvement in the group. MAIG has grown to more than 150 mayors in 44 states, and on its website has acknowledged the financial support from the Joyce Foundation, which has a history of supporting extremist gun control groups And anti-gun research.
The Foundation has provided funds to at least one group devoted to banning .50-caliber rifles, while grant funding has gone to the Violence Policy Center, CeaseFire New Jersey, the Freedom States Alliance, the Gun Guys anti-gun website, Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, Iowans for the Prevention of Gun Violence, Legal Community Against Violence, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Hoosiers Concerned About Gun Violence, New England Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence and many others.
The amount of money funneled to anti-gun groups from the Joyce Foundation over the past few years is staggering. In 2006, the Foundation gave $700,000 to the Violence Policy Center. Another $174,788 went to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. And the Foundation announced a two-year grant totaling $168,547 for the National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention “to develop an automated query system for the National Violent Death Reporting System.”
In 2005, the Joyce Foundation doled out a two-year, $700,000 grant to the Harvard University School of Public Health “to support the Harvard Injury Control Research Center’s technical assistance to the National Violent Death Reporting System, to conduct policy-relevant to firearm research, and to increase its communications capacity.” Another $650,000 (over an 18-month period) was granted to Mark Karlin & Associates in Chicago “to support the continued efforts of its Freedom States Alliance.” It also gave the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence a whopping $325,000 “for continued support of its public, media and policy-maker education efforts to promote firearm policy reform in Illinois.”
And the list goes on. In 2004, the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence got two one-year grants totaling $700,000, of which $300,000 was earmarked for the creation of “a network of state-based gun violence prevention groups” and the remaining $400,000 was to be spent to “educate the public about the risks of guns in the home and to enhance its media and communications presence…its statewide organizing, and coalition building, and its funding and membership base.”
Just about anywhere there is an anti-gun effort, the Joyce Foundation is frequently there with financial support. The Violence Policy Center is one of its biggest beneficiaries.
Recently, the MAIG held its first “national summit” in Washington, DC, as part of the National Mayors Conference. High on their list of priorities is to end federal restrictions on Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) gun trace data. Gun rights activists and organizations believe access to this data would allow anti-gun mayors to misuse it in order to keep filing lawsuits against the gun industry, despite a federal law against such lawsuits.
While Bloomberg and Menino contend they are not campaigning against “legal” guns, there has been no specific definition attached to the term “illegal gun.”
“Our coalition has refused to fall into the same old trap that this is an either/or issue—either respect the rights of gunowners, or keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals,” Bloomberg said at the summit in January. “The fact is, respecting the rights of gunowners while cracking down on illegal guns are completely compatible goals—and we are committed to both.”
Yet, to make guns “legal,” activists are convinced Bloomberg wants to make the entire nation adopt—and adapt to—laws that regulate firearms the way they are regulated in New York. That means licensing and registration, and just about everywhere outside of New York, that idea gets no traction with gunowners.
But the anti-gun mayors’ coalition is getting some traction on Capitol Hill, now that Democrats are once again in control of Congress. Vehement anti-gun Congressmen Charles Rangel (D-NY) and Peter King (R-NY), John Conyers (D-MI) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) have formed the bi-partisan Congressional Task Force on Illegal Guns. It is the announced goal of this group to “enact common sense measures to stem the flow of illegal guns” and to offer help to law enforcement to go after such “illegal” guns.
At the summit, MAIG heard the results of a survey by Alan Quinlan and Michael Bocian with Greenberg Quinland Rosner Research, which does polling primarily for Democrats, and from pollster Brian Nienaber with the Tarrance Group, a primarily Republican polling group. According to their findings, 58% of the respondents say “gun violence” is a top concern, and that 82% favor either more aggressive enforcement of existing gun laws or want new laws, and only 14% believe that some gun laws should be repealed.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, whose anti-gun agenda is a mirror image of that presented by Washington CeaseFire, the Northwest’s most active gun control organization, revealed that his city is already assembling “crime gun” data to “identify dealers engaged in illegal gun transactions. The target of this effort is straw man sales.
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