New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) announced a new television attack ad Monday against Republican New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte, who joined with five Senate Democrats last month in voting against the Manchin-Toomey bill to expand background checks on gun purchases.
MAIG’s ad, entitled “Gone Washington,” will run in the Manchester, New Hampshire and Boston media markets, beginning this week. MAIG previously released an ad featuring statements from representatives from the nonprofit advocacy group Granite State Progress and New Hampshire Project for Safer Communities, which will continue running alongside “Gone Washington.”
Ayotte has recently become a primary target of national gun-control activists. She was recently subjected to a radio attack ad from former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ superPAC Americans for Responsible Solutions.
The blue-state Republican senator held a pair of town hall meetings last week in her home state in which she stressed that mental health programs, not gun control, should be the solution to episodes of mass violence.
Erica Lafferty, the 27-year old daughter of slain Sandy Hook elementary school principal Dawn Hochsprung, was featured in a local New Hampshire news segment walking out of Ayotte’s town hall last week after asking Ayotte a confrontational question. Lafferty’s protest was later featured by NBC News and the Huffington Post. Lafferty, who said on the Today Show that she would “chain my body to (Sandy Hook) in protest if they try to reopen it,” also received press coverage Saturday for appearing at the National Rifle Association’s annual conference in Houston.
The Daily Caller previously reported that MAIG switched-out an ad attacking Republican Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey with a new ad praising Toomey after he introduced the background-checks bill.
