Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly made comments that police should try to take guns away from all male minorities between the ages of 15 and 25.
The Daily Caller, a conservative website, obtained his comments, which were delivered at an event in Aspen, Colorado. Here’s part of the audio, uploaded to YouTube:
“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one [unintelligible]. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people getting killed. First thing you can do to help that group is to keep them alive,” Bloomberg said. The Daily Caller article then says that Bloomberg, who heads the pro-gun control group Everytown for America, himself is“trying to block” the audio from being broadcast.
The comments from Bloomberg, 72, were also reported on by the Aspen Times in Colorado.
“These kids think they’re going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed,” he said. “They just don’t have any long-term focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.”
He also made references to New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk practices. The three-term mayor recalled when a Baptist minister in Harlem invited him to speak at their church several years ago.
“While I’m sitting there waiting for him to introduce me, he said to his congregation, ‘You know, if every one of you stopped and frisked your kid before they went out at night, the mayor wouldn’t have to do it,’” Bloomberg was quoted as saying. “And so I knew I was going to be OK with that audience.”
He added: “We did a calculation on how many people who would have been dead if we hadn’t brought down the murder rate and gotten guns off the streets. And the way to get guns out of kids hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.”
He also talked about Colorado’s move to legalize recreational marijuana, saying it will ultimately harm children.
“What are we going to say in 10 years when we see all these kids whose IQs are 5 and 10 points lower than they would have been?” he said. “I couldn’t feel more strongly about it, and my girlfriend says it’s no different than alcohol. It is different than alcohol. This is one of the stupider things that’s happening across our country.”
Newsbusters, a right-wing news organization, claimed the big TV networks ignored Bloomberg’s controversial statements.
“Would the ‘big three’ have remained silent if a member of the NRA or a pro-gun politician had said that all minorities aged 15-25 should be banned from obtaining a firearm, or would they claim that such remarks were discriminatory and racist?” it says. “The networks’ decision to ignore Bloomberg’s divisive comments is in stark contrast to the numerous promotional segments they have given his anti-gun activities over the years.”
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