What’s wrong with this picture? Besides everything. Let’s go over the four basic rules of gun safety:

The gun is always loaded. Never point a gun at anything you’re not prepared to kill. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire. Always be sure of your target and know what’s behind it.

Anyone who follows these four simple but very important rules is highly unlikely ever to have an accidental discharge of a firearm or, worse, an accidental shooting of another person. And yet this is what New York City’s nasty little fascist of a mayor, Mike Bloomberg, and his rogue’s gallery of Mayors Against Illegal Guns are currently advertising as normal gun-handling behavior.

This life-threatening nonsense has been widely pilloried in the blogosphere, by the estimable Emily Miller among others:

Mike Bloomberg is spending $12 million on attack ads designed to force U.S. senators to vote for national gun control laws that will supposedly save lives. However, the New York mayor’s commercials running in 13 states over the next two weeks could cause injury or death by showcasing irresponsible handling of a firearm. Mr. Bloomberg’s organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, produced two ads featuring a man holding a shotgun, wearing plaid flannel with a camouflage cap and sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck. While a child swings on a tire in the background, the man says, “I support comprehensive background checks so criminals and the dangerously mentally ill can’t buy guns.”

To which I’d like to add: take a look at the suspiciously well-manicured, bearded intensity of the man in the video and tell me you want this guy anywhere near your children, or even your senators:

Note also that Bloomberg and his fellow busybodies are attempting to disguise their fascism — “universal background checks,” a euphemism for a centralized information bank that would prevent parents from handing down weapons to their children without first going through the Washington bureaucracy — as “protection” for hunters. “Vote to protect gun rights” — yeah, right. The Leftist genius for disguising its true intentions has never been more brazen.

But let’s leave aside for the moment that the Second Amendment has little or nothing to do with hunting. The last thing the Leftists of the criminal organization masquerading as a political party and its hypocritical offshoot, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, want you to think about is your own personal safety, whether from street criminals or tyrannical government. (You can read all about a counter-organization, Gun Owners Against Illegal Mayors, here.)

As these two videos make clear. They depict a “progressive’s” kindly fantasy of yeoman rural America, right down to the flannel shirt, the camo cap, and the pickup truck, as if to say “we’re one of you” — but only an urban liberal would fall for it. No shotgun owner in his right mind would have his gun locked and loaded, with his finger on the trigger, while his kids played in the background. Because (see Rule No. 1, above) even when the gun is not loaded, The Gun Is Always Loaded.

The correct presentation would be to have the action open, finger off the trigger, and pointing either straight up or straight down. Like this:

As Mary Katharine Ham observes at Hot Air:

I really do hate to be a stickler, but if there’s one thing to be a stickler about, the basic rules of gun safety while you’re in an ad for alleged advocates of gun safety is a pretty good choice. Forgive me if I don’t feel like giving up my rights as a law-abiding citizen to a billionaire mayor who can’t instruct his recruits to keep their booger hooks off the bang switch. But by all means, continue to make laws without knowing jack about your subject. It always works so well.

And these are the people who want to run your lives, led by a man who still harbors a desire to run for president.