When Michael Bloomberg recently suggested that his pathway to heaven has already is paved by his many efforts toward gun control, he overlooked one of the Ten Commandments: the one about giving false testimony.

When Michael Bloomberg recently suggested that his pathway to heaven has already is paved by his many efforts toward gun control, he overlooked one of the Ten Commandments: the one about giving false testimony.

The billionaire ex-New York mayor�s long-running gun-prohibition campaign is built around falsehoods � a pattern of deceit that has included counting a slain terrorism suspect as a victim of gun violence, using a bogus claim about gun sales and background checks and grossly inflating the number of school shootings.He is spending $50 million on the �Everytown for Gun Safety� campaign to perpetuate these myths, and one should ask why. If this effort is so worthwhile, why is it based on a foundation of lies?When an earlier Bloomberg-funded effort, the �No More Names� bus tour, named as victims some criminals � including a Boston Marathon suspect � justifiably killed by police and private citizens, it was embarrassing.

The continued use of another questionable statistic, that 40 percent of gun sales occur without background checks, should be reason enough to doubt anything else that emanates from a Bloomberg-funded organization.

Yet The Dispatch on June 12 carried a story from the Los Angeles Times (�Pace of shootings up since Newtown,�) that said Everytown is a group that �promotes gun safety.� The group promotes gun control, regardless how it packages it.

Following a tragic school shooting at an Oregon high school, Shannon Watts, founder of a Bloomberg-supported group called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, claimed there had been 74 school shootings in the 18 months since the Sandy Hook tragedy. Many news agencies used that number without checking its veracity.When they finally did check, they discovered that many of these so-called �school shootings� were anything but. One was an apparent case of domestic violence in a school parking lot two weeks before school started.

CNN found that only 15 of the 74 shootings mapped by Everytown actually met the criteria of such an incident. Add to these canards the oft-repeated claim that �31,000 people die from gun violence every year.� This number creates the impression that they all are murder victims, and that�s simply not true. Check the FBI Uniform Crime Data and you will find that fewer than 8,900 people were murdered with guns in 2012. The others were suicides, accident victims and people justifiably shot by police or private citizens in self-defense. All of this boils down to one thing: Bloomberg can�t buy his way into heaven by trampling on the rights of his fellow citizens, and he sure shouldn�t cloak his intentions in a fabric of lies.

ALAN GOTTLIEB

Chairman

Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Bellevue, WA