Friday, January 4, 2013

Bloomberg Supports Gun Owners While Bashing Teachers

Bloomberg is one of the leading advocates for gun reform in this country. In fact, this is about the only thing on which I agree with the little emperor. We do need ways of keeping track of who owns an AK 47 and who's out there buying enough ammunition to wipe out a small town (or a school).

So you would think Mayor4Life would support the idea of publishing the names of gun owners in the papers. After all, this is public information that can be obtained legally elsewhere, so why would gun owners object? But when asked, he said, "My instincts would be no..."

Really? Suddenly this mayor is against publishing information in the papers? He certainly wasn't against it when it came to trying to publicly humiliate teachers by publishing flawed Teacher Data Report scores in the papers, even though his hand picked chancellor promised in writing that he would publicly fight against the release of the data, even if it meant going to court to support teacher privacy.

Of course, that didn't actually happen. What did happen was that the TDRs were FOILed, and the city actually pushed for the data to be released, even though they had promised not to allow it and even though they knew the data was horribly inaccurate.

And this mayor is so intent on making sure teacher data gets published in the papers that he is willing to walk away from the $250 million the city would get from a new evaluation agreement because he wouldn't be able to "hold teachers' feet to the fire".

So why not publish the names of registered gun users, Mr. Mayor? You certainly never promised the NRA that you'd never do so.

It can't be because the data would be inaccurate. I'm sure gun permit records are quite accurate in NY. Even if the data was wildly inaccurate, the mayor should object, since he supported the release of TDRs that varied more than 90% in a year.

Could it really be that Bloomberg hates teachers so much that he'd rather defend people building personal arsenals that could wipe out a school or a theater full of people in minutes?

I think it could.

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