This article was first published by the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, September 15, 2014:
Joyce Foundation Funding Patterns (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Despite efforts by Michael Bloomberg’s group, Moms Demand Action (MDA), to pressure the Kroger Company into changing its firearms policy regarding its customers, most Americans aware of MDA’s attack on the grocery chain are supporting Kroger. Earlier this month, MDA, with Bloomberg’s money, bought a series of newspaper ads and billboards in an attempt to force Kroger to stop operating its stores under prevailing state laws regarding unlawful firearms carry, and instead ban them altogether. Almost immediately thereafter, MSNBC launched a public opinion survey, asking: “Should Kroger shoppers be allowed to carry handguns?” At this writing almost 90% of those responding are saying “yes.”
This is remarkable, and reassuring, in light of the mainstream media’s support of the MDA’s action. On Friday, September 5, talking head Jan Crawford showed a clip on CBS This Morning of Shannon Watts, MDA’s founder, who expressed the hope that “Kroger will respond quickly, and we can move on to other companies and other laws and policies….” In that segment Crawford explained that the MDA “insists it is not against guns or the Second Amendment, but believes people shouldn’t be allowed to walk around grocery stores with loaded weapons.” In other words, Crawford, Watts, and MDA believe in the right of people to bear arms as long as they are prohibited from doing so.
Not only are Americans not buying the line, neither are those who were recently attacked either inside, or in the parking lot of, their nearby grocery store. For example there was a man who was attacked by men with a machete in a supermarket parking lot in Baltimore. There was an elderly woman who was attacked in a supermarket in Florida. And there was the thug who beat up a 61-year-old woman in a grocery store parking lot in Mississippi. There was a 79-year-old man who received a beating in a California grocery store parking lot. There was the slasher who attacked a customer in a New York supermarket, and the man beaten by a group of people while he was shopping in Philadelphia. The list goes on.
Missing from CBS’s report was any mention that Bloomberg’s organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, recently announced its campaign to survey every candidate running for office at either the state or federal level in the 2014 midterm elections. With the results of the survey, Bloomberg promises to inform every voter to vote either for or against those candidates, depending on their answers. In his attempt to challenge the National Rifle Association (NRA), Bloomberg has promised to invest $50 million in Everytown, which has already begun to brag about its success. On its website, Everytown – the result of the merger of MDA and MAIG – boasts that “more than 2 million mayors, moms, cops, teachers, survivors, gun owners, and everyday Americans have come together to make their own communities safer.”
Unfortunately the latest available data shows that MAIG has fewer than 1,000 mayors now claiming membership in Mayors Against Illegal Guns, while its sister organization, MDA, has a membership of fewer than 150,000.
None of this, however, is affecting Everytown’s agenda. As John Feinblatt, Everytown’s president and Bloomberg’s longtime senior policy advisor noted: “For too long, the gun lobbyists [in Washington] had the field to themselves. You don’t build a counterweight to the gun lobby overnight; We’re in this for the long haul.”
Bloomberg is not going this alone. There is the Joyce Foundation, which turned left after its founder, Beatrice Joyce Keane, died in 1972. In just the last 10 years Joyce has granted more than $12 million to gun control organizations, with more than $4 million of that going to the Violence Policy Center, a virulent anti-gun group founded in 1988. That group has called for an outright ban on handguns, semiautomatic and other weapons, along with substantial additional infringements on law-abiding gun owners. The Joyce Foundation also helped fund Bloomberg’s MAIG.
There’s the David Bohnett Foundation that funds LGBT rights and anti-gun efforts to the tune of $4 million a year, including the Brady Center, the Center for American Progress, the Violence Policy Center and, along with the Joyce foundation, helps fund the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. This Harvard group continues to promote David Hemingway’s book, “Private Guns, Public Health” which, due to shoddy research and manipulated data, has lost all credibility, even among those favoring its anti-gun ideology. Said one pro-gun control reviewer, “[I was] looking for a dispassionate, empirical review of the literature on guns and violence from a pro-control perspective. Unfortunately, [Hemenway’s] reasoning is far too weak to make this the definitive work that other viewers described.” He explained why:
As an example, Hemenway argues that Gary Kleck’s estimate of 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGUs) per year is wrong. He spends one sentence describing Kleck’s methodology, then tries to show that his estimate of DGUs against burglars, 845,000, was impossibly high. He calculates a “more reasonable” estimate of 20,000, by taking the number reported to police for a single city over a single four-month period, multiplying this number by 3 (to get an annual rate) and scaling it to the entire population of the US. He does not examine whether his sample is representative for the entire country over the entire year.
He also does not consider that DGUs which go unreported to the police would be missing from his estimate. In fact, he implicitly assumes that all DGUs are reported to the National Crime Victim Survey and the police, and uses this assumption to force the contradictions he needs.
Based on this discrepancy between Kleck’s estimate and his own, and a few more equally fallacious comparisons, Hemenway triumphantly dismisses Kleck’s work as “not plausible,” “a vast overestimate,” “grossly exaggerated,” and “the most outrageous number mentioned in a policy discussion by an elected official.” Hemenway also makes no mention of the 15 other surveys with similar DGU estimates cited by Kleck, yet still asserts that “all attempts at external validation [of Kleck’s estimate] reveal it to be a huge overestimate.”
This kind of sloppy deduction from unstated (and doubtful) assumptions completely destroyed the author’s credibility. This example is typical of his logic throughout the book. The worst part is that even when his arguments are logical, he rarely cites any references, so we have no way to ascertain the reliability of his evidence.
He also noted that the positive reviews of the book listed at Amazon.com appeared to have been manipulated: “All but one [of the positive reviews of the book] appear to have been written by markcarlin, as after he wrote the first five-star review, there were six more over the next few days, all written anonymously.”
Bloomberg also gets help from another collective, a gaggle of leftist liberal billionaire donors through a clearinghouse called Democracy Alliance (DA). According to Politico, they intend to do everything they can to influence the 2014 midterm elections as well, having just announced their intentions to spend $374 million to “boost liberal candidates and causes in 2014 and beyond.”
The only trouble is that the harder Bloomberg and his cronies push their anti-gun agenda, the more informed Americans aren’t buying it, according to the MSNBC poll. In its legislative alert last Friday, the National Rifle Association put it well: “We know that no matter how much money the anti-gunners spend, they can’t buy our freedom, because it’s not for sale.”
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Sources:
Campaign to shame Kroger ignores real dangers
Background on Mayors Against Illegal Guns
Background on Moms Demand Action
The Washington Post: Bloomberg’s gun group to start 2014 midterms strategy by surveying candidates
Background of Democracy Alliance
Harvard Injury Control Research Center
Amazon.com: Private Guns, Public Health
Background on Violence Policy Center
Politico: Inside the vast liberal conspiracy asking: “Should Kroger shoppers be allowed to carry handguns?“
MSNBC’s poll: Should Kroger shoppers be allowed to carry handguns? 87% yes
Everytown for Gun Safety – Who we are
CBS Boosts Bloomberg Gun Control Group’s Campaign Targeting Kroger
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