The gun control group Bloomberg and the NSSF are about as diametrically opposed as two organizations can be. One seeks to ultimately end private firearm ownership in this country while the other represents the businesses that sell those firearms to private citizens.
So there’s really very little common ground between the two organizations.
Yet it seems that Bloomberg was caught distributing items from an NSSF-funded initiative as if it were there own.
Billionaire and failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg should be able to pony up the money for his own gun control agenda, but one of his initiatives was caught red-handed trying to pass off the firearm industry’s Project ChildSafe® safety kits as their own.
John Richardson, a blogger and podcaster who writes about firearms, tweeted a photo taken at a gun show in Asheville, N.C., of the Bloomberg-backed group Be Smart stapling their own cards to what are clearly Project ChildSafe-branded locks. Those locks are paid for by the firearm industry and distributed free to communities through partnerships with over 15,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and five U.S. territories. Over 40 million of these free kits with firearm locking devices have been distributed in the past two decades.
It’s more than ironic that a billionaire’s gun control group swiped the firearm industry’s locks so it appears that it is “doing something.” It is downright disingenuous.
The tweet in question:
The Bloomberg supported group Be Smart had a booth at the Asheville Gun Show today. They are passing out locks paid for by @NSSF With Bloomberg’s billions, you’d think they could buy their own. Cheap [email protected] pic.twitter.com/p60yeq61u1
— John Richardson 🌻 (@jpr9954) March 4, 2023
Yeah, pretty obvious that those are Project Childsafe locks with a Be Smart cards stapled to them.
I’m sorry, but this has the same energy as the bully trying to put his name on the smart kid’s homework.
Bloomberg has nearly limitless resources. Its founder, Michael Bloomberg, is a billionaire with no heirs who is funneling pretty much all of his wealth toward gun control. I find it very difficult to believe they lack the resources to pony up the money for their own locks.
So, instead, they apparently swiped NSSF locks, staple their cards on it so it looks like Project Childsafe is part of Bloomberg, and carry on as if nothing shady is going on.
Now, it’s entirely possible there’s an innocent explanation for this.
However, it’s hilarious that groups like Bloomberg have tried to pretend the NSSF and the industry they represent care nothing about safety.
As the NSSF notes:
Shannon Watts, Founder of Moms Demand, has even smeared the firearm industry as “extremists” who are only “focused on profitability” over everything, “including the safety of the American public.”
But then Bloomberg, of which Moms Demand is a part, goes and pretends gun locks paid for by this same industry are somehow theirs?
It’s more than a little disingenuous if you ask me.
Some might argue that the important thing is that the locks are getting in the hands of people who might need them, and I won’t say that’s not true. Yet the very act of handing these out is a political statement in the gun debate, and since gun control advocates routinely claim the firearm industry doesn’t care, there’s a reason to get bent out of shape when some of those same advocates pretend locks paid for by that same industry were really theirs in the first place.
What’s more, Bloomberg and other gun control groups aren’t likely to change their rhetoric despite saving their own money by using the NSSF’s locks. They’ll just keep pretending that nothing ever happened.