With $50 million, one would think Michael Bloomberg and his anti-gun cronies could afford to conduct some focus testing. However, judging from the reaction to the latest fear-mongering ad from Bloomberg’s Everytown group, the ex-mayor and his astroturf activists are clueless when it comes to women and firearms.

The ad depicts a mother and child alone in a house. A man begins pounding on the door, demanding entry. The woman calls 9-1-1 and explains that her “ex” is trying to break in, and she has a restraining order against him. While the woman is still on the phone, the man bursts through the door and grabs the child.  As the unarmed woman futilely attempts to stop him, he pulls a gun. The screen fades to black, and a gunshot is heard.

The ad was released to coincide with a congressional hearing aimed at expanding federal firearm prohibitions pertaining to misdemeanor convictions and restraining orders. Yet the reaction to many who saw the ad makes clear that it does nothing so much as illustrate the limitations of those measures.

As the “ex” pounds on the door, he yells, “This is my house!” However unwittingly, the producers of the ad thus establish that the man would almost certainly be prohibited under current federal law from possessing a firearm, insofar as he cohabitated with the woman, and she had obtained an order of protection against him.

In any event, as far as the ad is concerned, the order appeared to provoke the man, rather than restrain him; the police could not respond in time to enforce it; and whatever legal repercussions the man faced for possessing a firearm illegally were manifestly not a deterrent. How this argues for the expansion of any of these measures is unclear.

On the other hand, the ad does make a rather compelling argument for the proposition that the only thing that could have saved the woman once the man burst through the door was her own exercise of the right to armed self-defense. Read more