Bloomberg Vows Stiffer Fight to Overhaul U.S. Gun Laws

The message is inevitably the same: A police officer has been shot on the streets of New York.

“I just gag,” Mr. Bloomberg said, recalling his feeling of dread. “Chances are I’m out of bed, into the bathroom, get some clothes on and off to a hospital.”

He races to get there, determined to arrive ahead of the family, he said, “so I can tell them that their son or daughter is not coming home.”

Ask Mr. Bloomberg about firearms, and his usual stoic facade falls away, revealing anger and exasperation born of years of witnessing the blood and tears that can flow from gun violence.

Now, furious at the deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn., and frustrated by inaction in Congress, Mr. Bloomberg said in an interview this week that he would ratchet up his fight to overhaul gun laws, drawing on his considerable political and finance resources to bring about change.

One of the world’s wealthiest men, Mr. Bloomberg plans to spend millions of dollars over the next two years to aid political candidates willing to oppose the gun lobby. He said he would not wait until 2014: the mayor’s “super PAC” is already looking at special elections next year, including governor’s races and an open House seat in Illinois.

Within days of the Newtown shootings, Mr. Bloomberg was on the phone with conservative senators, urging them to change their views. To his surprise, he said, some were willing to consider it.

“You could hear in their voice, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” he said.

The mayor plans an advertising campaign featuring Hollywood stars. And he has spoken with the White House, conferring with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. about the presidential task force on gun policy that Mr. Biden will lead.

“I’m in the enviable position of knowing there’s a need and having the wherewithal to do things, and the credibility to get other people to do it, as well,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Even so, the mayor is looking to move fast, aware that public outrage can fade quickly. “Whether this lasts or not, I don’t know,” he conceded, referring to the mood for change. “Some of my friends say, ‘You’re not going to get this done.’ ”

The latest chapter in the mayor’s gun crusade began a few minutes before 11 a.m. last Friday, when Mr. Bloomberg, leaving a meeting with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in Manhattan, glanced at his iPhone. A CNN news alert flashed across the screen: Students at an elementary school in Connecticut had been shot.

“Another disaster,” Mr. Bloomberg remembered thinking.

Three miles downtown, at City Hall, the mayor’s advisers began drafting a statement, but decided to delay its release until after President Obama had spoken. Mr. Bloomberg, aides said, wanted to see if the president would call for action — and to criticize him if he did not.

The mayor’s statement, issued just after 4 p.m., was blunt. “President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote, adding, “What we have not seen is leadership — not from the White House and not from Congress.”

The goal was to put immediate pressure on Washington for change. “The Democrats were unwilling to do it, and the Republicans didn’t want to,” said Howard Wolfson, the mayor’s chief communications strategist.

Mr. Bloomberg, meanwhile, took to the phones, calling members of Congress to urge the passage of an assault-weapons ban. To prepare his pitch, he instructed aides to find out how many Americans had been killed by guns since the Arizona shootings in 2011, when Mr. Obama last promised changes in the firearm laws. By Saturday, the mayor was on his private jet to Washington to push his case in an interview on “Meet the Press.”

It was a hectic weekend, and the culmination of six years of work by Mr. Bloomberg, who founded his national coalition, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in 2006, galvanized by a series of grisly police shootings in New York.

In 2005, weeks after being elected to a second term, the mayor found himself waiting for hours in an emergency room as doctors tried in vain to save the life of a police officer, Dillon Stewart, who had been shot in a car chase in Brooklyn.

Officer Stewart had been wearing a gun-resistant vest, but the bullet pierced his skin a few millimeters from the armor. At the hospital, detectives examined the vest in front of the mayor; when they pressed the vest with their hands, Mr. Bloomberg could see blood rise to the surface.

The mayor was angry that New York’s gun laws, among the strictest in the country, did little to protect against the use of guns bought illegally in other states. In his inaugural speech on New Year’s Day 2006, he pledged to curb “these instruments of death,” although, at the time, the gun-control movement was at a standstill.

“Virtually nothing was being said in Congress by some of the strongest allies; they basically had walked away from the issue,” said Robert Walker, who served as president of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the forerunner to the Brady Center, in the late 1990s. Mr. Bloomberg, he said, “filled the void at a time when it really needed to be filled.”

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