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A little confession: I’ve never been a big fan of Mayor Bloomberg. Perhaps my views are out of date, but I don’t like billionaires buying public offices. I don’t like the way he continues to control a big media business while in City Hall. (Sure, he gave up the C.E.O.’s job, but everybody at Bloomberg L.P. knows that, ultimately, he still makes the big strategic decisions.) I don’t like the pretense that he’s just a businessman with no ideology. (The cult of business efficiency is innately ideological.) And I don’t like the way he’s used his generous donations to the arts to seduce the city’s liberal and artistic elite. But when it comes to gun control, and particularly his response to the Newtown massacre, I’m here to say, Good on you, Mr. Mayor! More than anybody else on the political scene, Bloomberg has been saying what is crying out to be said: The U.S. gun laws, bought and paid for by the N.R.A., are a disgrace to the nation, an affront to the values it claims to represent, and a travesty of the Democratic process. To be sure, some Democrats, the President included, have, in the past forty-eight hours, moved beyond the cynical political calculation that confronting the gun lobby is pointless and self-defeating. On Sunday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, said that once Congress resumes she would introduce a bill to ban on assault weapons. (The previous ban expired in 2004.) And Dan Malloy, the governor of Connecticut, seconded the call for such a ban, pointing out that the lack of a federal law prevented states such as Connecticut from effectively enforcing their own restrictive gun laws. But Bloomberg has gone further than anybody, both in pointing out what should be the obvious, and in calling on President Obama to step up to the challenge. “It only happens in America,” he said today on “Meet the Press.” “And it happens again and again. There was another shooting yesterday. Three people killed I think in a hospital. We kill people in schools. We kill them in hospitals. We kill them in religious organizations. We kill them when they’re young. We kill them when they’re old. And we’ve just got to stop this.” David Gregory tried to pin Bloomberg down, asking him precisely what action he thought should be taken. Here, courtesy of the Guardian’s live blog, was the mayor’s reply: BLOOMBERG: Well, number one, I think the President should console the country. But he’s the Commander-in-Chief as well as the consoler-in-chief. And he calls for action, but he called for action two years ago. And every time there is a disaster like this, a tragedy like this, everybody says, “Well, now is not the time.” Or, “If you had fixed the problem, you can’t guarantee that this particular event would have been prevented.” All of that is true. It’s time for the President, I think, to stand up and lead. And tell this country what we should do. Not go to Congress and say what you guys want to do. This should be his number-one agenda. He is the President of the United States. And if he does nothing during his second term, something like forty-eight thousand Americans will be killed with illegal guns. That is roughly the number of Americans killed in the whole of the Vietnam War. GREGORY: So what do you do? BLOOMBERG: Well, there’s a number of things that the President can do and a number of things that Congress can do. And there are a number of things that you and I can do as voters. What the President can do is number one through executive action, he can order his agencies to enforce the laws more aggressively. I think there’s something like seventy-seven thousand people who have been accused of lying when they have applied for a gun permit. We’ve only prosecuted seventy-seven of them. The President can introduce legislation even if it doesn’t get passed. The President campaigned back in 2008 on a bill that would prohibit assault weapons. We’ve got to really question whether military-style weapons with big magazines belong in the streets of America in this day and age. Nobody questions the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. But I don’t think the founding fathers had the idea that every man, woman, and child could carry an assault weapon. And I think the President, through his leadership, could get a bill like that through Congress. But at least he’s got to try. And that’s his job. Indeed, it is. To be fair to Obama, nobody should underestimate the hatred, ignorance, baloney, mendacity, and borderline lunacy that would confront him if he were to follow Bloomberg’s advice and take on the gun lobby. For a taste of what it would be in store, look no further than Louis Gohmert, a Republican Congressman from Texas, who told “Fox News Sunday” that the best way to avoid a repeat of Newtown was to arm elementary-school principals, such as Dawn Hochsprung, the late principal of Sandy Hook, with assault rifles of the sort carried by Adam Lanza: I wish to God she had had an M4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids. There is no point trying to reason with Republican gun nuts like Gohmert, just as there is no point trying to reason with Republican anti-tax nuts about income-tax rates, or with Republican nativists about immigration. The task at hand is to defeat the extremists by rallying the public and appealing to moderate Republicans in Congress, those that still exist. Obama is doing this successfully on the question of taxing the rich. Surely, it shouldn’t be beyond his ability to do it, too, with keeping military-assault weapons off the streets. When Feinstein’s Sandy Hook bill reaches the floor of Congress, even some N.R.A.-approved Republicans will surely blanche at trampling on the memory of Principal Hochsprung and her pupils. Bloomberg’s timing is good, and his intervention carries an implicit threat. If the President once again tries to weasel out of taking on this challenge, he’ll face the prospect of a well-financed ad blitz pointing out his failure. It isn’t Hizzoner’s eloquence that makes his views more consequential than those of other elected officials: It’s his capacity to launch a national campaign on any issue he chooses. That’s hardly a shining example of democracy in action, and I’m not saying I’ve been transformed into a Bloomberg supporter. But on this tragic occasion, I’m more than happy to line up behind him and shout, “Go Mike! Give ‘em hell.” See our full coverage of the Newtown shooting.