What sells in New York City doesn’t sell well across the rest of the United States, according to Buzzfeed’s Jacob Fischler — or perhaps Michael Bloomberg simply sold a bill of goods in the first place.  After rising to prominence last December in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, Mayors Against Illegal Guns has lost critical resources over the last few months … mayors:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns is finding it hard to keep its membership up, thanks to dozens of resignations and lost elections over the last few months.

Worse for Bloomberg, who has become one of the faces of the gun control movement: the people replacing his lost comrades aren’t particularly eager to sign up with the organization, a rare group battling in the trenches against the well-organized and deep-pocketed National Rifle Association. Some appear not quite to have signed on for that level of political heat.

Part of this can be chalked up to incompetence.  MAIG proclaimed a list of gun victims in order to score political points, only to find that they had included perpetrators of gun violence as victims such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber killed in a firefight with police a few days later — when his brother ran over him with the getaway vehicle.  It also included Christopher Dorner, the rogue ex-cop on a murder spree whose name had been in the news a couple of times and who ended up committing suicide.

As if MAIG wasn’t already shooting itself in the foot in its public relations, its curious web-hosting arrangement came to light.  Bloomberg, who has billions of dollars in wealth, had Big Apple taxpayers footing the bill for his anti-gun crusade.  Given MAIG’s efforts to attack officeholders for their votes, the decision to host the site on city government servers, the cheap attempt to shrug off its own costs made MAIG seem not just incompetent at PR but possibly at following the law, too.

Mostly, though, mayors have dropped out because they felt duped about the purpose of the group:

“The original focus, I thought, was going to be on focusing on better on enforcement of our existing laws, and if anything, we have talked about not getting involved with things like banning assault weapons and banning magazine clips,” said Rockford, Il. Mayor Lawrence Morrissey, who left the group in June because, he said at a town hall meeting, the group had veered from what he originally thought it was about. …

Nashua, N.H. mayor Donnalee Lozeau removed her name from the MAIG website when the group released an attack ad, which claimed that Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who voted against the failed Manchin-Toomey gun legislation, was misleading voters when she claimed to have supported background checks in the past.

“I simply cannot be part of an organization that chooses this course of action instead of cooperatively working with those that have proven over a lifetime of work their true intentions,” Lozeau said in a statement to Nashua’s the Telegraph. “I have faith that Senator Ayotte will continue to work toward finding a responsible solution relative to these issues.”

With that in mind, it’s not difficult to see why new mayors won’t sign up for MAIG’s membership list, especially those that replace mayors bounced out of office with that on their resumé.