I place this under the desk with other President Obama listed, "Under the Radar", items.
Scandal! Cities pay anti-gun lobbyists
Jeff Knox explains how your tax money is used to undermine 2nd Amendment
Jeff Knox is a second-generation political activist and director of The Firearms Coalition. His writing can regularly be seen in Shotgun News and Front Sight magazines as well as here on WorldNetDaily.
Cities
around the country have created staff positions for professional
lobbyists whose primary function is to drum up support for anti-gun
legislation, ordinances and regulations. Part of these lobbyists
salaries are being paid by grants from do-gooder foundations like the
Joyce Foundation, but the balance of salaries, benefits and support
costs are being borne by you, the taxpayer.
An
associate of mine in Florida named Sean Caranna was doing some research
for his grassroots rights organization, Florida Carry, Inc., when he
came across something on the agenda of the Orlando City Council that he
immediately recognized as a serious problem.
The
item was for the renewal of a contract for a city employee. That’s
mundane enough, but the job title of this particular employee was “Mayors Against Illegal Guns
regional coordinator,” and the job description is to “play an integral
role in the coordination and planning of gun crime prevention and
illegal gun-related initiatives, events and media opportunities in the
city and in the region” (the full council agenda and detailed
information can be found on the City of Orlando website).
In
the case of Orlando, the grant is $60,000 from something called the
“United Against Illegal Guns Support Fund,” which appears to be a front
group set up by billionaire mayor of New York City Mike Bloomberg – the
creator of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. The Joyce Foundation provides
the primary funding for Bloomberg’s “support fund” to the tune of
$650,000 in 2011 and at least $1,000,000 more in the previous 3 years.
While
the grant to Orlando pays the bulk of the regional coordinator’s
salary, the city is allocating $24,000 of citizen’s money to fund the
position and providing other city resources and facilities for her use.
The person tapped for the job is a woman who has worked as a regional
coordinator for the Brady Campaign Against Guns, and as a professional
lobbyist for MAIG and several other groups.
In
essence, the city is paying $24,000 to have an anti-rights
organization’s lobbyist working in their offices and pretending to be a
city employee.
After
discovering this scam in Orlando, Caranna began digging deeper and found
similar sweetheart deals in several other cities around the country,
including Seattle, Milwaukee, Columbus and Minneapolis. Based solely on
the funding numbers from the Joyce Foundation, there should be at least
10 of these regional coordinators around the country – working against
rights and being compensated in part by taxpayers.
Finding
them all has proven to be a bit of a challenge, as no one from MAIG,
Joyce or the Support Fund seems interested in advertising the
coordinators’ existence. Caranna found, and my own research confirms,
that some cities try to keep their participation in the scheme on the
down low by using initials or euphemistic titles and job descriptions,
but now that we know about the scam, I don’t think it will take long to
expose most all of the pseudo-city employees. With more than a million
and a half dollars granted to the project over the past 4 years by the
Joyce Foundation alone, there has to be a money trail to follow. We also
know all 600 mayors involved in MAIG and will be scouring the books of each of them looking for traces of this scheme.
I’m asking all of the members of The Firearms Coalition
and all of my readers to help us locate these taxpayer funded
anti-rights lobbyists. You can find a list of all of the participating
mayors on the MAIG website and then launch your own investigation into any of them you choose.
While
we’re at it, let’s look into this whole concept of private grants
funding, and influencing, public policy. On its surface, the idea of a
charitable group helping a municipality do some public service seems
reasonable; a family group might support municipal preschool and after
school programs, for instance. But if that group has a political agenda,
or demands inclusion of a controversial curriculum, the “gift” becomes
questionable.
From one
side these grants look like a way for the charitable group to make
their dollars go further while helping a city reach its goals, but it is
also a way for a pressure group to get public funding for their agenda.
Imagine
the uproar if a city created a staff position for the promotion of
firearm safety training with funding from the NRA Foundation. Even if
the program focused solely on safety and never crossed into the rights
issue or promotion of firearms ownership, the media and hoplophobes
would go ballistic.
The
very innocuous and apolitical Eddie Eagle Gun Safe program, with
coloring books and video cartoons teaching kids that if they come across
a gun they should “Stop – Don’t Touch – Leave the Area – and Tell an
Adult,” comes under fire because it is given to schools and police
departments free by the NRA Foundation.
Public-private
partnerships can be good things, but local politicians need to be
extremely cautious about giving the keys to the city to any outside
group whose altruism might be driven by a political or social agenda.
The old adage of never looking a gift horse in the mouth does not apply
in civic matters – just ask the Trojans. It is very tempting to a
politician to be able to offer constituents some valuable service at a
fraction of its normal cost, so it’s up to the citizens to be attentive
and keep their politicians on the straight and narrow.
For those who might not know, Mayors Against Illegal Guns is a political group formed by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. It has an agenda almost identical
to that of the Brady Campaign and other anti-gun groups, but it goes to
great lengths to make its proposals seem reasonable and moderate when,
in fact, they are intended to make firearms ownership more difficult and
dangerous. Bloomberg has spent millions of dollars from his own very
deep pockets and the pockets of New York taxpayers to advance his agenda
and is receiving additional millions from the Joyce Foundation – the same Joyce Foundation that gave Barack Obama a paid directorship as a stepping-stone into politics.
This scandal will be unfolding for weeks, and probably years, to come. The
more information we can dig up on the MAIG employees infiltrating
municipal government, the better chance we will have of putting a stop
to this theft of taxpayer money. Check your local government
for any private-public partnership grant programs – particularly
programs funded by MAIG – and let me know what you find. Together we can
pull the mask off of this beast and return control of municipal
government to the people who live there.
Read more about this breaking story at Sean Caranna’s blog, AllNineYards.com, and join the discussion about this issue at GunVoter.org.
Why does this NOT surprise me... sigh... Now the question will be how to get them OFF the payrolls.
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