Gun Control & RKBA

In July, Everytown rolled out a 10-point questionnaire for congressional candidates on gun safety priorities; the plan is to reward supporters and go after those who don't measure up—even if, says Wolfson, that means endangering the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. It's a page straight from the NRA playbook.

"This is about building a foundation," Watts says, "and it can't be built on whether you have Democrats or Republicans in office. Many Democrats have shown that they are just as in the pocket of the NRA as their Republican counterparts. This has to transcend political labels."

Above all, Bloomberg is planning to hit the airwaves on a scale Washington has not fully grasped. “He described his effort last year as putting his toe in the water,” says Wolfson. Bloomberg plans to spend heavily in the 2014 midterms to support Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and North Carolina’s Hagan, both of whom voted for background checks.11 And he plans to spend very heavily against the Democrats up for reelection who voted against the bill—Alaska’s Mark Begich and Arkansas’s Mark Pryor.

Pryor is no NRA favorite—he had a C- rating before the vote—while Begich is a former member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. But Wolfson emphasized that only their votes on the bill counted. “It will be critical to ensure that people who voted for it are reelected, and people who voted against it pay an electoral price,” he says. I asked Wolfson if he was worried that going after Pryor—whom they regard as especially vulnerable—would simply lead to his replacement with a pro-NRA Republican. “The fact that a Republican would get elected is irrelevant to our cause,” says Wolfson. “On this issue, a Republican would not be worse.”