Chuck Ross, Daily Caller, February 16, 2015

An audio recording of a talk former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has attempted to block from being broadcast has surfaced online.

The full audio of the Feb. 6 event, held at the Aspen Institute, shows that the 73-year-old media mogul’s remarks about minorities and gun control were even more candid in some respects than initially reported.

“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your–95 percent of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one [unintelligible]. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America,” said Bloomberg.

“You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people getting killed,” he continued. “First thing you can do to help that group is to keep them alive.”

While it is true that upwards of 95 percent of shooting victims and suspects fit the categories Bloomberg suggests, his implication that minority gun owners should be targeted was called “slander” by Tom King, the president of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association.

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Representatives for Bloomberg recently asked the Aspen Institute and GrassRoots TV, the company that filmed the event, to refrain from broadcasting the talk, the Aspen Times reported on Friday.

“The kids think they’re getting killed anyways because all of their friends are getting killed,” Bloomberg told the audience, which reportedly numbered around 400. “So they just don’t have any long-term focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun, it’s a joke to pull the trigger.”

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Bloomberg, who heads the pro-gun control group Everytown for America, also spoke about “stop-and-frisk,” a controversial tactic police have used to rid the streets of guns and to cut crime.

“We did a calculation on how many people who would have been dead if we hadn’t brought down the murder rate and gotten guns off the streets,” Bloomberg said. “And the way to get guns out of kids hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.”

Bloomberg also defended the tactic from accusations that it is racist.

“So one of the unintended consequences is, people say ‘Oh, my God you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities,’” Bloomberg said.

“Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes that’s true, why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the first thing you can do for people is to stop them getting killed,” Bloomberg said.

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