Bloomberg's blueprint

The president's poll numbers are low, public enthusiasm for gun control is low, crime is low. He'd be a fool to tick off gun owners in advance of the next election. Keep shining the light on Bloomberg's agenda and it might crawl back into the shadows whence it came.

In the echo chamber of NYC, this crap plays great. And Bloomberg is eyeing a run for the White House in 2012. We can yell all we want, but Americans elected Obama and he had a pretty antigun record. I wouldn't rule Nanny Bloomberg out. Not by a long shot.

Bloomberg just got re-elected IIRC. He's bullet-proof right now.

Bloomberg might be bullet-proof, but the president and congressional Democrats are not, and what Bloomberg is requesting depends mostly on the federal executive branch. I'm no political analyst but Obama will own this thing, and it is likely to cost him and the Democrats more in the 2010 or 2012 elections than it could benefit them. It might be popular in the echo chamber of New York but he's got that sewn up anyway. I'm sure Obama would adopt all 40 recommendations if he could keep it relatively unnoticed, but if gun owners keep up the noise level those 40 recommendations could be whittled down to 10 or 5 or 3 or maybe even less. There's also the threat of litigating them under _Heller_, since the contours of the RKBA are far from settled. Litigation over these policies would keep gun owners stirred up through the 2012 election, which would benefit Republicans more than Democrats.