This Week's Attitude
Mayors' Coalition Against Guns Is No Shot In The Dark
By Neil S. Friedman

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg's second term ends in three years, it's uncertain whether he'll seek another elective office. After all, the self-made billionaire has plenty of options. While some have speculated that he may seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he has denied it. I doubt he'll want to take on the toughest job in America after completing almost eight years at the second toughest elected office in America.

You gotta respect the guy who has already developed the kind of legacy that will be hard to follow, no matter who succeeds him. Mike Bloomberg has generally improved conditions, which has gone a long way to better the lives of most New Yorkers and made it more attractive to tourists. Crime has been drastically reduced every year since he's been in City Hall, elevating New York as the safest big city in the nation. He has improved city services and reduced the city's jobless rate to its lowest level in 18 years.

Most importantly, he and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein began the needed transformation from the old Board of Education to making the new Department of Education more responsible for educating city students by reducing the bloated bureaucracy for which that agency was notoriously known for decades.

Over and above his assorted accomplishments, Mayor Bloomberg's most lasting legacy may be his unwavering campaign to end the local and national plague of illegal guns that is responsible for a majority of violent crime in America and 30,000 gun-related deaths annually. He has become relentless on finding new solutions to an old problem that many legislators have for decades refused to confront because the influential National Rifle Association regularly stokes their election campaign coffers.

The seed of Bloomberg's crusade began soon after he settled in at City Hall when he learned of the startling statistic that more than 80 percent of guns used in crimes in the city came from out of state. Many of those can usually be traced back to southern states, including Virginia and Georgia, leaving New York at the mercy of states where lax rules on gun sales prevail.

NRA supporters must have chuckled when the city initiated federal lawsuits last spring against 15 gun dealers involved in illegal gun sale activities in five states. However, less than three months later, in an unprecedented agreement, two dealers decided to allow their gun sales to be monitored by a court-appointed representative and pay stiff penalties for any future violations. By September, three more gun dealers - from Georgia, Virginia and Pennsylvania - agreed to comparable settlements.

Lawsuits notwithstanding, Bloomberg was in-strumental in mobilizing a national coalition of mayors whose principal goal is the reduction of illegal guns across America. The mayors have for the time being silenced the gun lobby's political muscle mainly because they are targeting the trafficking of illegal guns, not interfering with hunters' rights to own licensed guns or meddling with the so-called Second Amendment right to bear arms that the NRA inaccurately champions at every opportunity.

The coalition took shape in April when Bloom-berg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino hosted 13 other mayors at a Gracie Mansion summit on illegal guns and created an agenda for action at the local, state and national levels. As word about the group's line of attack spread, the movement snowballed as mayors from such disparate municipalities as Akron, Ohio, Anchorage, Alaska, Sparks, Nevada, York, Pennsylvania, Yonkers, New York and Rio Ranchos, New Mexico sign on. The Mayors' Coalition Against Illegal Guns has snowballed and currently boasts 115 members from no less than 44 states.

After the first meeting last April, Bloomberg said, "If the leadership (to rid our nation of illegal guns) won't come from Congress or the White House, then it has to come from us."

Essentially, each mayor has pledged to work with prosecutors and law enforcement officials in their cities and towns to increase penalties for those who possess, use and sell illegal guns. The breakthrough in the mayors' activities has been the five accords with gun dealers, who, in many states, seldom abide by even the most lenient laws or through loopholes in federal regulations sell multiple guns to a single buyer in a single purchase. Those illegal weapons more often than not wind up in distant cities where they are ultimately used to commit a variety of felonies, sometimes resulting in the loss of innocent lives.

In keeping with the coalition's vow, last week Bloomberg joined Governor George Pataki when he signed legislation - which became effective November 1 - to increase penalties for anyone caught with a loaded illegal firearm, making New York the toughest state to get caught with an illegal gun. The mandatory is now three 1/2-seven years, stiffer then when, according to Bloomberg, "those arrested got off with a slap on the wrist."

Perhaps, at last, Mike Bloomberg and other mayors can do something that seems to have been ignored by or eluded most elected officials for too long - the end to senseless violence that is more appropriate on movie screens and video games, not on New York's or America's streets.