Kansas Congressman Rebukes NYC Mayor on Guns
Date: May 21, 2007 12:25 PM
How many people actually saw the ad targeting Mr. Tiahrt is another question. Two stations in Wichita refused to run it, questioning its accuracy and calling it misleading. (This is a media rejection of NYC Bloomberg attack ads)

http://www.nysun.com/article/54886

May 21, 2007 Edition > Section: National > Printer-Friendly Version

Kansas Congressman Rebukes Mayor on Guns

BY RUSSELL BERMAN – Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 21, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/54886

WASHINGTON ? Rep. Todd Tiahrt is Mayor Bloomberg’s bogeyman, the congressional embodiment of what the mayor says is a powerful lobby allowing illegal guns to flow onto the city’s streets.

As part of his national campaign against illegal guns, Mr. Bloomberg has targeted Mr. Tiahrt aggressively, even running television ads in his Kansas district that tell voters that a law their congressman sponsored is helping criminals, not the police.

The veteran Republican lawmaker has stayed mostly quiet in the face of the onslaught, but now he is fighting back. In a 30-minute interview in his office last week, Mr. Tiahrt accused Mr. Bloomberg and his aides of negotiating in bad faith, and he says the famously nonpartisan mayor is putting politics over police safety.

“I think it’s a self-serving effort to put a political agenda above the safety of our law enforcement officers,” Mr. Tiahrt said.

The measure he has sponsored, known as the Tiahrt amendment, puts limits on the use of gun tracing data by law enforcement agencies and in civil litigation. City officials argue that it ties their hands in aggressively prosecuting gun crimes and getting illegal guns off the streets.

Mr. Tiahrt says the opposite is true.

Repealing the amendment, which has passed Congress each year since 2003, could endanger undercover police officers by making aspects of their investigations available to the public, he said.

“They could be, by looking at the trace data, ferreted out, or discerned, and that would place them in jeopardy as well,” he said.

To city officials, Mr. Tiahrt’s claims are beside the point. In the eyes of City Hall, the congressman is a foot soldier for the National Rifle Association and a spokesman for the gun industry. And to Mr. Tiahrt, Mr. Bloomberg is using a “passion for gun control” as a plank in a national, if not presidential, campaign.

Mr. Tiahrt, 55, is a former Boeing executive first elected to Congress in 1994. A lifetime member of the NRA, he is a staunch advocate of the Second Amendment, saying guns in the hands of private citizens act as a deterrent to criminals. He owns about a dozen guns himself, some for collecting and others for hunting. “I have more guns than I need and not as many as I want,” he said with a laugh.

In the interview, he also offered a glimpse of Mr. Bloomberg’s personal style, as the mayor first tried to persuade Mr. Tiahrt to agree to changes in the legislation before taking a more hard-charging approach. The courtship began with charm ? the mayor sent the congressman a copy of his book with a personal inscription ? but soured before long.

Mr. Tiahrt met with Mr. Bloomberg and his aides in the congressman’s Capitol Hill office on January 23, while the mayor was in town for a summit on illegal guns. He described the meeting as cordial, saying he presented himself as open to negotiating on some areas of the legislation ? allowing the sharing of aggregate trace data ? while not budging on others, such as the use of the data in civil litigation.

He characterized City Hall officials as less open to compromise. “It became very clear to me that they didn’t want to come to some sort of agreed settlement on something that would be good for police officers and effective for catching criminals,” Mr. Tiahrt said. “They wanted to go to where the mayor wanted to go, and they wanted to do it at the peril of undercover police officers.”

Within three months of that initial meeting, Mr. Bloomberg, through his coalition against illegal guns, had unleashed television ads in Mr. Tiahrt’s district, along with the districts of other key members of the House Appropriations Committee. In the ad that ran in Wichita, Kan., a narrator urges constituents: “Ask Representative Tiahrt why he voted to protect criminals, instead of cops.”

How many people actually saw the ad targeting Mr. Tiahrt is another question. Two stations in Wichita refused to run it, questioning its accuracy and calling it misleading.

Mr. Tiahrt said he called the mayor when he heard about the ad last month. Mr. Bloomberg told him things weren’t moving fast enough and that the advertising might speed up the process, the congressman said. Mr. Tiahrt wasn’t buying it. “For him to use these ads to try to make something happen doesn’t make any sense,” he said of the mayor. “It’s just that he’s trying to push this political agenda.”

City Hall tells a vastly different version of events and blames Mr. Tiahrt for causing the impasse. The city’s criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt, said Mr. Tiahrt never followed up on the January meeting and infuriated city officials by secretly offering a proposal for a revised bill that would have stiffened the Tiahrt amendment by tightening restrictions on the use of trace data in civil suits.

The changes, Mr. Feinblatt said, could cripple the city’s efforts to sue gun dealers across the country for engaging in illegal “straw purchases.”

“If Todd Tiahrt is worried about protecting gun dealers who are violating the law, then we have to part ways,” Mr. Feinblatt said, defending the mayor’s decision to target the congressman in ads.

The city has settled with 12 of the dealers it has sued; they have agreed to broad oversight of their practices. New York officials gleaned much of the evidence for the lawsuits by sending private investigators into the gun shops to perform sting operations. Gun rights advocates have railed against the mayor’s tactics, and the state of Virginia in March outlawed the use of private investigators without supervision by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Mr. Tiahrt also had choice words for the strategy, calling it a “vigilante-style effort.”

The firestorm over his amendment, meanwhile, shows no sign of abating. Mr. Tiahrt says he intends to try to renew it in the coming months, and he touts the support of the Bush administration along with the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest association of law enforcement officers, with more than 300,000 members.

For the city’s part, Mr. Feinblatt cited the backing of more than 160 mayors and 20 national or state law enforcement organizations. He also responded to Mr. Tiahrt’s chief reason for supporting the legislation ? that its repeal could jeopardize the safety of undercover officers. Mr. Feinblatt said there is little evidence to suggest that is true. Beyond that, he said, the city has consistently expressed willingness to restrict access to trace data to the general public.

He portrayed Mr. Tiahrt’s argument as a recent creation, pointing to statements the congressman made when he first introduced the measure in 2003. At that time, he bragged that the NRA had reviewed and approved the language in the bill, and he told the Washington Post: “I wanted to make sure I was fulfilling the needs of my friends who are firearms dealers.”

To Mr. Tiahrt, the city’s protestations may not matter now. “This isn’t a struggle that I went out looking for,” he said. But neither is it one he seems eager to give up.