Know Your Billionaire Bullies: Ken Lerer

As if Mike Bloomberg's billions weren't enough for us to fight, another plutocrat has joined those arrayed against gun ownership.  Venture capitalist and Huffington Post founder Ken Lerer has started a new website called Stop The NRA.

Even though it hasn't worked for 50 years, the antis still seem to think that demonizing the NRA is a sound strategy for gun-grabbing. The Stop The NRA site is exactly what you would expect: carefully chosen and edited news stories intended to make gun ownership look bad interspersed with predictable screeds about the bad, bad NRA.

Having worked there 20 years, I can tell you that the greatest fear of the top echelons at NRA is that people like Ken Lerer might stop attacking it, because the harder those attacks are pressed, the louder the cash register rings. That this isn't self-evident to the anti-gunners has always puzzled me, but I have given up trying to understand them.

Asked what caused him to put his money trove at the service of Bloomberg and other tramplers of the Bill of Rights, Lerer said gun violence is "tearing the country apart."

"I also don't like bullies," he adds. "And the NRA is a bully. And Congress needs leadership from the outside."

Well, we aren't so wild about bullies, either, especially those who use their fortunes to promote oppression of their less wealthy fellow citizens. That's what's tearing the country apart.

---