By Rick Manning
Limousine liberals are endangering your Second Amendment rights. While these celebrities and billionaires can afford armed and trained bodyguards, homes surrounded by walls, high-tech security and surveillance systems, panic rooms, and even armored cars, they want to disarm average citizens who live in much more dangerous neighborhoods and can’t afford such elaborate security measures.
And now in Congress they might be about to get their way in the wake of the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings.
In 2013, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent $12 million on an advertising campaign promoting background checks. The following year, Bloomberg announced his plan to spend $50 million on gun control and founded Everytown for Gun Safety. Everytown was formed from the merger of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which Bloomberg had co-founded in 2006. Bloomberg also recruited Warren Buffett to the advisory board of Everytown.
In 2015, the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund began meddling in Virginia politics. That year, the Action Fund spent $2 million to help Democrats running for the Virginia Senate. Just two years later, the Action Fund spent $1 million to help elect Democrats Ralph Northam and Mark Herring to statewide office; Virginia voters subsequently learned that both had worn blackface. Also in 2017, it was reported that Bloomberg had spent $135 million on gun control.
Last year was a busy one for Everytown. The gun-grabbing group teamed up with the March for Our Lives and the March for our Lives Action Fund to organize the anti-gun rally in DC. Everytown also joined with the Giffords Center and NextGen America to register high school students and spent $5 million to defeat Republican members of Congress. Finally, Everytown partnered with Levi Strauss to try to ban all private gun sales except for those made in retail stores.
Of course, many well-known names joined Everytown in its support of the March for Our Lives. For example, George and Amal Clooney, Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw, all contributed $500,000 to the march. Taylor Swift also contributed.
Fortunes created by Microsoft have been used to fund anti-gun ballot measures in Washington State. In 2014, billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates, Steve and Connie Ballmer, and Paul Allen gave over $2 million collectively to an anti-gun ballot measure. Four years later, Allen and the Ballmers once again collectively gave over $2 million in support of another anti-gun ballot measure.
Gabby Giffords’ anti-gun super PAC has also proven popular with liberal billionaires. Unsurprisingly, Bloomberg and Connie Ballmer have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the super PAC. Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook, and Marc Benioff, the chairman of Salesforce, have also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Last year, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation announced that it would be contributing $20 million to the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research. The Arnold Foundation planned to raise an additional $30 million from other funders. While gun violence research might not sound very concerning, one need look no farther than the Arnolds’ choice to lead their research effort to see in which direction the research is likely to go. They have hired Jeremy Travis, an anti-gun extremist, to serve as the Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at the Arnold Foundation. Travis clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsberg and played a key role in crafting New York City’s gun ban.
Of course, no list of liberal billionaires who oppose gun rights would be complete without George Soros. In 2013, Soros’ Open Society Foundations gave $150,000 to the Joyce Foundation’s Fund for a Safer Future, which was set up to advocate for gun control. Soros also gave $50,000 to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
These celebrities and billionaires represent just a tiny fraction of the hordes that would happily seize your guns, but they represent a significant source of funding for the anti-gun agenda. Be sure to keep the contributions of these people in mind the next time you are considering going to a movie starring George Clooney or to a Taylor Swift concert, buying a pair of Levi’s or insurance from Geico (which Buffett owns), or watching Oprah or Bloomberg’s TV channels.
Billionaire leftists like George Soros, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and John Arnold are spending millions of dollars to exploit the tragedies of El Paso and Dayton to undermine the individual right to keep and bear arms. Whether it be Soros’ campaign to elect anti-gun prosecutors who fail to fully enforce the law against violent criminals while aggressively pursuing enforcement of fraudulent red flag claims without due process, or Gates, Bloomberg and the Arnold Foundation that have spent their resources convincing so-called moderate Republicans that they can be just a little bit pregnant when they support slippery slope measures leading to gun confiscation, it all leads to the same outcome.
Every American gun owner who simply believes in individual liberty should contact their Congressmen, Senators and the President and tell them to say no to the billionaire leftists and support the right to keep and bear arms and due process.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
