Not too late for Obama's conservation legacy -- May 29, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

From the maddeningly crammed streets and vulgar displays along the Virginia Beach oceanfront, it’s only a 40-minute drive to the peaceful and scenic Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Back Bay -- a 9,100-acre barrier island preserve of island marshes, maritime forests and pristine beaches – was established by President Franklin Roosevelt by proclamation in 1938 as a haven and breeding ground for migratory birds and other wildlife.

More than 120,000 people visit the refuge every year, most to watch the 10,000 snow geese and ducks that fly over Back Bay during the peak of the winter migration. Even in the off season, though, there’s plenty to see. Herons and snowy egrets pose majestically. Turtles sun themselves on log rivieras and snakes, naturally, slither. 

On the Blue Goose Express, an open air tram, local history buff Bob Baxter leads visitors back in time. A century ago, the area was dotted with duck hunting lodges, visited by wealthy industrialists. Life-saving stations every seven miles along the coast plucked unfortunate mariners from the sea.

We take a short hike to historic Wash Woods in False Cape State Park, which adjoins Back Bay. All that remains of the remote community of farmers, fishermen and hunters and a church that seated 300 worshippers are the steeple and about a dozen tombstones under whispering live oaks.  

About 47 million people will flee urban noise and stress for the tranquility of national refuges this year. 

Visitors will savor birdsong and unspoiled scenery; they’ll take pictures, swim and camp.

Few may think about how important presidents have been in keeping our wild spaces in citizens’ hands.

Since Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill establishing Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872, presidents have played a crucial role in conservation. 

“I will do everything in my power to protect . . . great natural beauties of this country,” vowed Theodore Roosevelt, who enjoyed being president because he liked having “my hand on the lever.”

The 26^th president set aside 230 million acres in public land and created 150 national forests, 51 bird reserves, four national game preserves, five national parks and 18 national monuments.

He left his successors the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president or Congress the power to designate national monuments. The president can act unilaterally. 

He’s no TR, but Obama still could leave a conservation legacy.

“I’ve preserved more than 3 million acres of public lands for future generations. And I am not finished,” 

Obama said May 21 when he used the Antiquities Act to create the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, protecting half a million acres in New Mexico.

But the congressional resistance Obama faces extends even to conservation. Dozens of bills that would protect lands and wildlife are stalled in Congress.

In February, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed rules to regulate oil and gas production on the national refuge system.  Yes, more than 200 wildlife refuges have existing oil and gas infrastructure and 100 have active oil and gas wells.

The government owns the land but not the oil and gas mineral rights beneath the ground, and the government lacks the authority to regulate private oil and gas development on the refuges. That’s why it has proposed rules.

Noah Matson, vice president of Lands Conservation for Defenders of Wildlife, warned a House panel May 20 of instances on wildlife refuges of oil drums oozing toxic chemicals, oil-topped open waste ponds, abandoned storage tanks and rusted, leaking oil pipes “fixed” with plastic bags and duct tape.

Two Louisiana Republicans on the committee blasted Matson for his “emotional” testimony and for failing to credit the “innovative” fixes.

Republicans also want to curb presidential power under the Antiquities Act, which presidents of both parties have used. Obama has used the act 11 times, starting in November 2011 with the Fort Monroe National Monument in Hampton, Va.  

The House voted in March to limit the president’s power to designate monuments, requiring reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The bill has little chance in the current Senate because the Democratic majority is opposed.

When signing the order designating Organ Mountains a national monument, Obama said he understands “our obligation to be good stewards to the next generation – to make sure that our children’s children get the same chance to experience all of these natural wonders.”

He needs to follow TR’s lead, keep his hand on the lever and follow through on his conservation promises.

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Restoring the meaning of Memorial Day -- May 22, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For many of us, Memorial Day is a long weekend of backyard barbecues and beach trips, the unofficial start of summer fun.

But it wasn’t always so. Memorial Day began as a spontaneous outpouring of grief after the ravages of the Civil War.

At least 620,000 soldiers – about 2.5 percent of the population – perished in that war. Recent estimates put the toll far higher – closer to 20 percent of the population. Nearly every family lost someone. To cope with their sorrow, groups of women began visiting their loved ones’ graves and decorating them with spring flowers.

The ritual, known as Decoration Day, sprang up in the North and South. One of the first was in Columbus, Ga., in April 1866, when women visited a cemetery to put flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers who had died in the bloody battle of Shiloh four years earlier. Seeing the neglected graves of Union soldiers, the women also placed flowers there.    

In 1868, Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, who led an organization of Union veterans, declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30 with ceremonies and strewn flowers. It’s thought he chose the date because flowers would be in bloom all over the country, according to a Department of Veterans Affairs history.

By the end of the 19^th century, nearly every community dedicated May 30 to remember their Civil War dead. After World War I, the commemoration was extended to honor all who died in American wars.

How, you ask, did we go from solemnly strewing flower petals to buying mattresses, appliances and big screen TVs?

Thank -- or blame – the 1960s, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson. LBJ signed the Uniform Holiday bill in 1968, and, since 1971, Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Washington’s birthday (now Presidents Day) have been commemorated on Mondays.

“This will mean a great deal to our families and our children,” LBJ said in a signing statement. “It will enable families who live some distance apart to spend more time together. Americans will be able to travel farther and see more of this beautiful land of ours. They will be able to participate in a wide range of recreational and cultural activities.”

He didn’t predict that the true meaning of the holidays might get lost in traffic jams.  

For years, the late Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii tried to restore the dignity of Memorial Day. Inouye, a veteran who lost his right arm in combat in World War II, introduced a bill in every Congress to move Memorial Day back to May 30.

“In our effort to accommodate many Americans by making the last Monday in May Memorial Day, we have lost sight of the significance of this day to our nation,” Inouye said in a speech on the Senate floor in 1999. “Instead of using Memorial Day as a time to honor and reflect on the sacrifices made by Americans in combat, many Americans use the day as a celebration of the beginning of summer,” he said.

Inouye continued his valiant effort until his death in 2012. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii has taken up the quest, introducing the bill last year. 

We don’t have to wait on Washington to honor the fallen on Memorial Day. Many of the 131 national cemeteries as well as state veterans cemeteries have ceremonies on or around Memorial Day. To find one near you, check out the list on the VA's National Cemetery Administration page.

  

At a time when the VA is suffering from a health care scandal, here’s some good news. Veterans’ survivors rank employees at the national cemeteries tops in customer service among all federal agencies and major national corporations.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index surveys people about their dealings with government agencies and companies. Every three years, the survey asks about national cemeteries. In each of the last five surveys – 2001, 2004, 2007 and 2010 and 2013 – the cemeteries have received the top rating for customer service in the public and private sectors.  

National cemeteries are quiet, green spaces that invite solemn reflection. Make time for a walk in history. Read the names and dates on the white markers. Thank those who gave their all for us and our freedom. Happy Memorial Day.

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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A storyteller turns preacher for math, science in digital age -- May 14, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Twenty-five years ago, a rising star at Time magazine got on a train in New York bound for Washington to hear one of his heroes give a lecture.

How quaint, I hear you saying, with 21^st century impatience. Print. Train. Hero. Lecture. Ho hum.

Not so fast. The magazine man was Walter Isaacson, then 36, who had been writing on a computer since the early 1980s, the only writer at Time doing so. Apple’s Steve Jobs would later ask him to write his biography. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

Isaacson’s hero was novelist Walker Percy, chosen to deliver the 1989 Jefferson Lecture. Its sponsor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, says the lecture is “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Percy’s lecture on “The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind” was one of his last public appearances. He died a year later at 74.

Isaacson had known “Uncle Walker” – actually the uncle of a friend -- since his boyhood in New Orleans. Isaacson tried to figure out what Percy did. He had trained as a doctor and people called him Dr. Percy, but he didn’t practice medicine.

“He seemed to be at home most days, eating hog’s head cheese and sipping bourbon,” said Isaacson, who was about 9 when Percy’s first novel, “The Moviegoer,” appeared in 1961. That’s when Isaacson realized someone could make a living as a writer the way others did as an engineer or a fisherman.  “The Moviegoer” won the National Book Award, and Percy kept writing.

Percy told him two types of people come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers.

“For God’s sake, he said, be a storyteller. The world has far too many preachers,” Isaacson recalled Monday night onstage at the Kennedy Center where he delivered the 43^rd Jefferson Lecture.  

It’s heartening to know that the federal government still honors intellectual achievement – and with an old-fashioned lecture and $10,000 prize. It’s encouraging that the Concert Hall was nearly filled, although a reporter for Inside Higher Ed observed that the audience may have been slightly smaller and grayer than previously.  

That’s not surprising. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese was last year’s lecturer. Conservationist and author Wendell Berry spoke in 2012, and Harvard president and Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust was the speaker in 2011.

Isaacson, who turns 62 on May 20, is one of those achievers who make even industrious bees feel like they’ve wasted too many hours flitting around Facebook and the Food Channel.

A Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he was a political reporter, national editor and editor of new media before becoming the editor of Time. He then was chairman and CEO of CNN. He’s the author of bestselling biographies on Jobs (2011), Albert Einstein (2007) and Benjamin Franklin (2003), among others.  He’s president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies institute based in Washington.

In January 1984, Jobs lugged an original Macintosh to Time magazine to show it off. The editors called in Isaacson so they’d have one person there who actually used a computer. The two men kept in touch and in 2003, after he was diagnosed with cancer, Jobs asked Isaacson to write his biography. He didn’t mention the diagnosis. Isaacson took the opportunity to tell Jobs’s story.

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told Isaacson. 

“Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” 

The authorized biography was rushed into print in 2011, days after Jobs died at 56.

Isaacson titled his lecture “The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences.” Offering a rosy view of a digital future in which human creativity fuses with technology, he acknowledged he was “singing to the choir” about indispensible human imagination.

But he also challenged those who love the arts and humanities to shake off their complacency about not knowing math or appreciating science.

“Many people who extol the arts and the humanities…will proclaim without shame (and perhaps even joke) that they don’t understand math or physics. They would consider people who don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be uncultured, yet they might merrily admit that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome,” he said.

“Trust me, our patron Thomas Jefferson and his mentor Benjamin Franklin would regard as a Philistine anyone who felt smug about not understanding math or complacent about not appreciating science,” he said.

And so the storyteller preached on the need for math and science in the digital age. My guess is that both Walker Percy and Steve Jobs would have approved.  

(c) 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Whose prayer? Minority gets short shrift at Supreme Court -- May 8, 2014 column

By Marsha Mercer

Imagine that you have a child with Down syndrome, and you want your town to open a group home for children with the condition.  

When you go to your town board to make your case, the meeting starts with a Christian prayer. A minister stands at a lectern. facing the small group of assembled citizens, and invites everyone to join in a prayer to Jesus Christ, the savior of the world.

For more than a decade, residents of Greece, N.Y., a town of 94,000 near Rochester, faced such a situation whenever they had business with their town board. Then, two women – one Jewish and one an atheist – complained about the Christian prayers and filed a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court.

The women contended that the board’s practice of inviting only Christian clergy to lead the opening prayer violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by preferring Christians over others and by sponsoring sectarian prayer.

The practice was coercive because “it is impossible not to participate without attracting attention to yourself, and moments later you stand up to ask for a group home…having just, so far as you can tell, irritated the people that you were trying to persuade,” Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor, told the court in oral arguments last November.

On Monday, a majority of justices disagreed. The court ruled 5-4 in Town of Greece v. Galloway that the board could continue opening its meetings with Christian prayers. The majority upheld the majority religion; the minority got short shrift. 

“Adults often encounter speech they find disagreeable,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.  People who “feel excluded or disrespected” by the prayers should ignore them or leave the room, Kennedy brusquely suggested.  So much for walking in someone else’s shoes.

Kennedy noted that all the clergy in the town directory from which prayer-givers were chosen were Christians, reflecting the town. His opinion was joined by the court’s four conservatives – Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. 

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote:  “I think the town of Greece’s prayer practices violate the norm of religious equality – the breathtakingly generous constitutional idea that our public institutions belong no less to the Buddhist or Hindu than to the Methodist or Episcopalian.”

Kagan made clear she was not advocating a prayer- or religion-free zone but the board had done nothing to recognize religious diversity.  Until the lawsuit was filed, the “chaplain of the month” was always a Christian.

“So month in and month out for over a decade, prayers steeped in only one faith, addressed toward members of the public, commenced meetings to discuss local affairs and distribute government benefits,” Kagan wrote. That practice “does not square with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share in her government,” she said. 

Joining Kagan’s dissent were Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

About three in four Americans approve of prayer at public meetings as long as officials don’t favor one belief over another, a national poll last December by Fairleigh Dickinson University found.

As with any case involving religion and government, reaction on both sides was swift and strong.  

“This is the first good thing the Supreme Court has done in a long time,” declared Randall Wise, mayor of Niceville, Fla., where the city council has been praying at meetings since before he became mayor 42 years ago.

Even if the court had ruled against the prayers, Niceville’s city council would have kept praying, he insisted.

“We would have kept doing it until they stopped us with guns or took us off to jail,” the mayor said, the Northwest Florida Daily News reported.

But the red headline on the website of Americans United for Separation of Church and State was unequivocal in its opposition:  “Supreme Mistake!”

Laycock, the University of Virginia law professor, told NPR the ruling “is a green light for local majorities to impose their religious practices on their fellow citizens.”

And that goes against the grain in our pluralistic society.

Kagan had it right. “When the citizens of this country approach their government, they do so only as Americans, not as members of one faith or another,” she wrote.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

'Mockingbird' flies for new generation -- April 30, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

As millions of Americans rushed to embrace the ebook, some of our best-loved authors defied the trend. 

“An ebook is not a book,” E.L. Doctorow, author of “Ragtime” and “The Book of Daniel,” declared last year when he received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation.

Bestselling author Jonathan Franzen has warned readers that they’re being duped into thinking they need electronic devices for reading.

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of `Freedom.’ I can spill water on it and it would still work. So it’s pretty good technology,” Franzen said at a literary conference in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2012, the Daily Telegraph reported.

“And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” he said.

Harper Lee, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning “To Kill a Mockingbird” has sold more than 30 million copies in 40 languages, wrote fellow book-lover Oprah Winfrey in 2006:  

“Can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up – some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.”

You can read Doctorow’s and Franzen’s books in digital “cold metal,” despite the authors’ misgivings. Until now, though, if you wanted to curl up with Scout, Jem and Atticus Finch and read about injustice and heroism in the South, you held a book with soft pages. Many readers still do. It still sells upwards of 1 million copies a year.

Lee, who is called Miss Nelle in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., – Harper is her middle name -- was one of the few authors holding out for the print book. She resisted the ephemeral incursion until her 88^th birthday, last Monday.

HarperCollins announced that digital versions of Mockingbird will be released July 8, the 54^th anniversary of the book’s publication.

“I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries,” Lee said in a statement released by her publisher. “This is Mockingbird for a new generation.”

The reclusive Lee didn’t explain why she decided to send her masterpiece into the digital age, but you can bet she worried over it. In her letter published in O magazine in July 2006, Lee recalled growing up with books in a family of readers.

“So I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and the Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often…A park for games? Not a hope,” she wrote.

“Now 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books,” she added. 

Doctorow, 83, who will receive this year's Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, also talks about being a prodigious book reader as a child. He too still plods along with books. But he warns today's authors not to lose heart the way naturalistic novelist Frank Norris did in the late 19th century.

“Norris despaired of the Western Union telegram – 10 words and stop – the Twitter of its day. He feared it was the end of literary discourse. If people could express themselves completely in 10 words, the human mind would eventually be inaccessible to works of 100,000 words,” Doctorow said at the National Book Foundation event.

Norris also regarded the typewriter as the enemy of creativity, believing that much was lost when writing wasn’t done by hand.

“We don’t want to be today’s Norris – silly fellow he was,” Doctorow said. Could he have been thinking of Franzen, who hates Twitter and says it’s doubtful anyone with an internet connection can write decent fiction?

Better to be tolerant of change than to cling to the past. Harper Lee has it about right. It’s time for a new generation to discover Mockingbird.

So, young readers, if you choose to curl up in bed with a computer, that’s OK. Just don’t spill water on it.

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Justice takes the long view -- April 24, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

At a party, I ran into a friend who retired a few months ago after a stellar journalism career in Washington.   

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“I’m still trying to figure out how to be retired,” he said. “I start every morning going over what I don’t need to do that day.” No commute downtown…no speed-reading the newspaper…no worries that something is taking too long, he said.  

This prize-winning journalist looked sheepish, as if he’d been put out to pasture instead of liberated.

In America, you’re nobody unless you’re crazy busy. And that’s crazy wrong.

Learning to be retired shouldn’t mean learning to be obsolete. Consider the retirement of John Paul Stevens. You may have caught the former Supreme Court justice, who just turned 94, on the media interview circuit. He’s a soft-spoken gentleman who favors bow ties and civility in an age of the rant. His new book is “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.”

Nominated to the court by Republican President Gerald Ford in 1975, Stevens became one of the court’s most reliable liberals. He resigned four years ago after nearly 35 years on the bench and wrote a memoir.

After taking time to read newspapers and other publications and to reflect on the court’s rulings when he was in the minority, Stevens turned in his latest book to where he thinks the court has gone wrong. He makes the case for change through an almost impossible route, amending the Constitution.

His proposals on the death penalty, guns, campaign finance and gerrymandering are making waves. But Stevens concedes that none is likely to become part of the Constitution soon; eventually, maybe. Give him credit for taking the long view.

His book began to take shape after the shooting massacre of school children in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, he told Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker.

“I read a newspaper story that said the federal database of criminal records might be incomplete because of a decision of the Supreme Court,” Stevens said. The court had ruled in 1997 that the federal government could not make states participate in background checks for gun sales.

“I thought if that decision might be responsible for a situation like the one in Newtown, they ought to change it. That got me to thinking that there had to be other rules that ought to be changed,” Stevens told Toobin.

Stevens proposes allowing Congress to force states to participate in background checks. He would limit the right to bear arms by adding five words to the Second Amendment: “when serving in the militia.”

The revised Second Amendment would read: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms when serving in the militia shall not be infringed.

“Emotional claims that the right to possess deadly weapons is so important that it is protected by the federal Constitution distort intelligent debate about the wisdom of particular aspects of proposed legislation designed to minimize the slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns in private hands,” Stevens writes.

Stevens still holds the admirable idea that the primary duty of someone in public office is “to make impartial decisions, not motivated by personal profit or personal gain or advantage” to his or her political party.

When he read a newspaper story about a Maryland redistricting plan in 2011 that benefited Democrats, he was incensed. In an interview on Scotusblog.com, Stevens called the redistricting plan “outrageously unconstitutional.”

He proposes to prohibit gerrymandering -- legislators drawing state and congressional districts with the goal of boosting the political strength of the party in power.

“It doesn’t take a genius,” Stevens told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, to see that the shapes of some congressional and state legislative districts are fishy.

Reading and reflecting require time. They’re the first things we throw overboard in our multi-tasking lives and the last we retrieve when daily pressures relent.

Working or retired, we all could benefit from thinking about the country we want. Whether you agree or disagree with Stevens, his ideas deserve the same serious thought he has given them and intelligent debate.  

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

The $50 million question -- April 17, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

One thing about billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg: He’s an optimist.

The former mayor of New York plans to drop a chunk of his own change -- $50 million -- this year to build a grassroots political organization aimed at reducing gun violence.

That’s a lot of money to most of us, but Bloomberg, whose wealth is calculated to be $31.2 billion, threw out the $50 million figure in an interview “as if he were describing the tip he left on a restaurant check,” The New York Times reported.

To put the sum into perspective, $50 million is less than the severance package the fired chief operating officer of Yahoo received. Henrique de Castro got $58 million after just 15 months on the job. Political groups run by the industrialist Koch brothers reportedly have spent $30 million in the last six months, backing Republican candidates for the Senate.

 

Can $50 million change the national political climate on guns? The answer is almost surely no, and Bloomberg must know that. He has already spent millions trying to persuade Congress to require background checks for gun purchases, to no avail.

  

A year ago, the Senate killed a bipartisan compromise amendment that would have required most buyers at gun shows and online to undergo criminal and mental background checks, but exempted sales or gifts to friends and family members. The vote was 54 to 46, but it needed 60 votes to beat a filibuster and advance. 

Polls showed a vast majority of Americans supported the measure, but the National Rifle Association fought for its defeat, claiming it would have “criminalized certain private transfers of firearms between honest citizens, requiring lifelong friends, neighbors and some family members” to obtain government approval. PolitiFact rated the claim Mostly False.

Polls still indicate broad support for background checks, and a few states have passed limited gun control measures.

So Bloomberg is trying a new approach with Everytown for Gun Safety, an umbrella group that covers two gun control groups he supports financially – Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America – with about 1.5 million members. The goal is 2.5 million members. 

With Congress unlikely to touch gun control this election year, Everytown hopes to mobilize women and mothers in state elections, using Mothers Against Drunk Driving as a model. Since it was founded in 1980, MADD has changed attitudes and prompted tighter laws against driving while impaired.

Everytown intends to push for expanded background checks, keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and other “gun sense” policies. It plans field staff in 15 states -- Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

Bloomberg wants to challenge the clout of the N.R.A., which typically spends about $20 million a year on political activity. The N.R.A. has raised $13.7 million for the 2014 election cycle and has spent $241,000 targeting candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign expenditures.

Gun rights advocates dismissed Bloomberg’s announcement as more of the same. “He’s got the money to waste,” Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America and a former Virginia state legislator, told the Times. “So I guess he’s free to do so. But, frankly, I think he’s going to find out why his side keeps losing.”

Katie Pavlich, news editor of Townhall, a conservative site, said in an interview with N.R.A. News that Everytown would target “ignorant, emotional women who don’t know much about the firearm industry.”

Bloomberg says this is a “battle for the hearts and minds of America.” Many politicians have tried, and failed, to defeat the N.R.A. Bloomberg, now a private citizen, is the first to put serious money into the effort. But even $50 million may be far from enough.   

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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