Is there a backlash to the backlash on Ayotte's gun-control vote?

I’m blogging this because you’ll hear no end to the talk of how Sen. Kelly Ayotte’s vote on the gun-control bill marks the moment when pro-gun-control forces start effectively punishing those who cross them on national legislation. Second Amendment forces are, of course, historically much better at enforcing voting behavior with millions of active citizens willing to pick up the phone and vote based on the issue. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun group went in big against Ayotte with $400,000 on multiple ads.

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But Bloomberg’s group has had a rough public relations week. Gone is the unassailable moral authority as Bloomberg activists were caught padding the stats for gun-violence victims with the likes of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Chris Dorner. Bloomberg is also housing his group’s site on taxpayer funded government servers in New York and administered by government employees.

This week, we learn at least one of Bloomberg’s mayors has left the coalition. Nashua Mayor Donnalee Lozeau says she left the group when she saw the first ad against Ayotte. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t want to be part of something like that,'” she said.

Nashua Mayor Donnalee Lozeau says she resigned from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” group in mid-May, shortly after joining the nationwide coalition, because it went beyond its stated principles of “keeping illegal guns out of dangerous hand.”

Lozeau said she did not know when she joined that the group would “unfairly attack” fellow Nashuan Sen. Kelly Ayotte in a $2 million barrage of ads after Ayotte opposed an amendment calling for universal background checks for gun purchases in April.

Lozeau said she was out of the group long before last week’s controversy erupted when Mayors Against Illegal Guns supporters read the name of dead Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and other murders and criminals in a list of those killed by guns since the Newtown Elementary School massacre at a rally in Concord last week.

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Ostensibly, Lozeau is exactly the kind of supporter Bloomberg’s gun group is meant to keep hyped on this issue— a moderate Republican mayor with a relatively pro-gun-control constituency living in Ayotte’s own backyard.

And, since it’s the main news of the day, and I know you want to talk about it, I’ll leave you with this “Hmmm.”

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