Dave Hardy has some excellent reporting on how Bloomberg may be secretly funneling money into the gun control movement. Dave mentions a reason for this could be so that Bloomberg can fund other more radical projects, but continue to appear to be moderate on the issue. Dave posits that the reason Joyce hasn’t donated much to the Brady Campaign is because they are too moderate. If that is indeed the case, it might explain why they’ve been turning up the crazy lately. It could be the Joyce mothership, and Bloomberg, not only dig the crazy, but benefit from it. Dave also notes that the Brady organization has been hemorrhaging money. This has been going on for a while now, actually, and I’m surprised they can still function. Not only function, but they felt they had the money to hire a new President, rather than just continuing with Dennis Henigan. It’ll be interesting to see if all the crazy talk coming out Brady these days is intended to signal to mama Joyce that they’re as serious about lunacy as all the other gun control groups.
And if Joyce is really looking for crazy, why? It’s a reasonable question to ask, so put yourself in Bloomberg’s shoes. He has his Mayor’s organization. They are the moderate face of gun control, when their members aren’t busy getting arrested, indicted or sent to prison. They are the ones proposing serious policies and trying to move the middle. But moving the middle is tough, because you run into the problem of the NRA, and people who are active in the gun rights community. In fact, if there’s one thing Media Matters and CSGV have in common it’s an attempt to discredit the National Rifle Association, and harass and intimidate those who support them. The CSGV outing of gun bloggers, along with taking our quotes out of context and spinning them as racist, lunatic, or worse, may actually be part of a coordinated strategy funded largely out of Bloomberg’s pockets. This way he has the lunatic groups, who have no bearing on the policy debate anymore, do his dirty work for him. If he were to do this directly with the MAIG organization, we’d use it to attack his mayors, and destroy his credibility when he tries to move the policy debate, and he knows that.
I could be far off base here, and giving the gun control groups way too much credit, and the lunacy we’ve witnessed the past few years might only be anger and resentment as they slip farther and farther into irrelevancy. But I don’t think Bloomberg is to be underestimated. I could easily see a cohesive strategy here at work that would make perfect sense. Bloomberg can’t move the issue without discrediting NRA, and too a much lesser degree other parts of the new media and horizontal interpretive communities established in the gun rights movement. MAIG will do that (with the help of Frank Luntz) on the up-and-up, and the Joyce grantees, funded indirectly with Bloomberg money and with no credibility left to risk, get to do the dirty work.
