The Conference of Mayors has backed gun control laws for more than 40 years, Nutter says. Mayors rally for action on guns

Mayors in cities with high gun violence rates are ready to lead a push for stricter gun laws, frustrated by years of inaction at the state and national level.

“It is unfortunate that it took a massacre in Newtown to get to the national conversation that should’ve occurred in years past when we saw people dying in the streets of Gary and Detroit and other places,” said Karen Freeman-Wilson, the Democratic mayor of Gary, Ind., which had the nation’s highest murder rate for cities of its size in 2010 and 2011. “It’s very sad. … And it shouldn’t take the death of all of those children for us to not just change the conversation to the other extreme but just get the conversation to the center.”


Two major groups of mayors — the long-established U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Michael Bloomberg-backed Mayors Against Illegal Guns, founded in 2006 — are set to play a major role in the coming debate over gun control, where they can win media attention and make the case for gun control even in strictly conservative states such as Utah and South Carolina.

“After 9/11, the United States of America said we will do whatever it takes to make sure that we are safe while flying,” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, the president of the Mayors Conference, told the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on Wednesday, adding “I want the same comprehensive response to international terrorism to the daily, domestic terrorism that I see and other mayors all across the country experience on a regular basis.”

Nutter later said getting sued by the National Rifle Association on his 100th day in office in 2008 was “one of the proudest moments of my entire political career.” The organization challenged a city law requiring gun owners to report lost and stolen weapons to the police. The NRA’s case was thrown out, but the group is still trying to overturn the law.

The Conference of Mayors has backed gun control laws for more than 40 years, Nutter said Thursday at the opening of the conference’s winter meeting. Today, the organization backs a wide gun control agenda, including a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Two of the biggest speeches at this weekend’s winter conference will come from the nation’s most prominent gun control advocates: Vice President Joe Biden and Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City.

The mayors’ role in the debate comes from two unique positions. About 60 percent of U.S. firearm deaths occur in the 62 cities located in the nation’s 50 largest metro areas, according to 2006 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Cities’ constant grappling with the problem gives mayors both the passion to push gun violence and expertise on the issue. At the same time, their relatively limited powers means they’re at the mercy of a Congress and state legislatures far less open to restricting gun ownership.

Biden acknowledged this duality in his speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Thursday.

“No group was more consequential or influential in what we put together than all of you in this room,” Biden told the roughly 300 mayors gathered in a hotel ballroom at the Capitol Hilton, referring to the package of gun control laws and executive actions he and President Barack Obama unveiled Wednesday. “I know you folks have a lot of influence,” he said a few minutes later, before quickly adding: “Well, that’s not true.”

The mayors laughed, but some are chafing at the limits of their power.

“We are pre-empted out of [gun control] by our state Legislature and I think that’s a shame,” said Kansas City Mayor Sly James, a Democrat who served in the Marines. James emphasized he has no problem with legal gun ownership, but in the past 10 days, a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old and a 7-year-old have been shot in Kansas City.

“We can’t address it,” he said. “We have no ability to do anything. I would love to have an ordinance in our city that says if your weapon is stolen out of your home or lost, you gotta report it. We can’t do it. And it’s eminently logical; it has nothing to do with interfering with anybody’s rights. But if a weapon is lost and it’s now on the streets of Kansas City or stolen out of your home and it’s now on the streets of Kansas City, I’d like for the police officers who are dealing with the problem to know that.”

Republicans have a supermajority in both chambers of Missouri’s Legislature.

In Vermont, a deep-blue state with a strong gun culture, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger joined Mayors Against Illegal Guns earlier this week, and the city council passed a local assault weapons ban. But since the ban would involve changing the city’s charter, it needs state legislative approval. Weinberger isn’t sure that’s forthcoming.

“That’s very unclear,” he said.

While Weinberger is a blue-state addition to the Mayors Against Illegal Guns, most of the more than 115 mayors who have signed up since the Newtown massacre are from swing or red states, and the group now has representatives in all but two states (Alaska and Wyoming are the holdouts). Many of the mayors are coming from smaller cities, with a median size of about 10,000 and an average size of around 70,000, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns Director Mark Glaze. In Colorado, the group has gone from having zero members to having 15 members after Gov. John Hickenlooper left the Denver’s mayor’s office at the beginning of 2011.

In some areas, mayors stand out as the lone pro-gun control politicians. Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker said his vantage point leaves him “under no illusions” about the difficulty of getting a gun control law through Congress.

Becker, a hunter, described two incidents in Salt Lake City that could have turned into a mass shooting along the lines of Virginia Tech. The first, at a popular shopping mall, was averted only because an off-duty cop happened to be nearby. The second, at a hotel, was avoided when a former police dispatcher working the front desk quickly alerted authorities. But Becker wanted action before his city’s luck ran out.

“I hope that people in states like mine, where the initial reaction is ‘Don’t have government do anything. These won’t make any difference,’ that people will move beyond the rhetoric,” said Becker. “And consider what we can do that is reasonable, that is completely within the confines of what we treasure in the Second Amendment. And we can take some measures. And it’s going to take Congress.”