News broke this week that former Microsoft CEO and current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA franchise, Steve Ballmer, has donated $7 million dollars to Michael Bloomberg’s gun control umbrella group, Everytown for Gun Safety.
Put another way, a tech and sports titan reportedly worth over $72 billion is giving a media titan reportedly worth over $60 billion a king’s ransom to take away the civil right to keep and bear arms of ordinary Americans.
Both men, of course, live in fortresses and are routinely surrounded by armed bodyguards. It’s not necessarily guns they hate; it’s just your guns.
So it goes in the gun prohibition movement, an American phenomenon sustained by wealthy elites who are completely oblivious to and sheltered from the common experience of hardworking Americans who in most cases have no choice but to see to their family’s protection themselves.
Armed bodyguards, after all, don’t come cheap.
This isn’t Ballmer’s first foray into gun control financing. In 2014, he joined other Washington State tech billionaires in helping to fund an initiative to push through a state-level ban on private firearm sales. In 2018, he also helped fund another gun control initiative where he and a handful of other billionaires teamed up to provide nearly all of the funding for that effort.
Everytown’s 2020 fundraising seems to be headed in the same direction.
For all their claims on the popularity of the gun control policies they push, Everytown seems completely reliant on donations from a handful of very wealthy donors to keep its gun control apparatus afloat.
Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Click here to follow NRA-ILA on Facebook.