Bloomberg wants to change the GOP

“A lot of them are, all of a sudden, pro-immigration,” he said. “It turns out that Latinos, Asians didn’t vote Republican because they were against immigration. As my kids would say, ‘Dah,’ ” the New York mayor said in his Boston accent. A conversion on guns for a party that many political observers consider increasingly conservative seems an awfully long-term project for a mayor who has urgently advocated gun-crime prevention measures. It is also a tough sell considering that his name — demonized by the NRA — can elicit virulent tirades among gun owners in the South. Bloomberg has his own way of allaying those concerns.

“There are clearly some people who really believe that the government is out to get them, and they are going to fight to the death on guns,” Bloomberg said. “And then there is the general public that thinks this is meshugana” — crazy.

This month, New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested that the unapologetically cosmopolitan Jewish billionaire was perhaps not the best face for sensible gun laws. The criticism stung Bloomberg’s supra-political sense of self.

Bloomberg’s organization funded research, launched “Demand a Plan,” a grass-roots campaign to pressure the president and Congress to end gun violence, and helped write legislative proposals in the Senate aimed at preventing gun trafficking. In 2009, the organization stopped an NRA-backed bill from reaching the Senate floor, and it recently blocked an effort to strip some background checks in Michigan. But the NRA remains dominant in many statehouses, and it has succeeded in getting laws passed that relax gun restrictions.

It has seemed at times that Bloomberg was the NRA’s only active opposition. The grim succession of mass murders pushed military-style weapons into the national consciousness and prompted Bloomberg’s group to add an assault-weapons ban to its agenda. (Since the Newtown shooting, 441,495 new supporters have joined the coalition, as well as 100 new mayors, bringing the total to 837.)

“Some people, I think, woke up after Newtown,” Feinblatt said. “We’ve been awake.”

Feinblatt said Biden’s office had solicited ideas from the mayor and his group. (“We have given a lot of input,” Bloomberg said.) Feinblatt cited the closing of the private-sale loophole as the bare minimum that needed to come out of the process, while Bloomberg focused on things that could be done with an executive order — such as a recess appointment for director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the prosecution of gun-permit applicants who lie on their background checks (in 2010, the FBI referred 76,000 cases to the Justice Department, which prosecuted 44 of them) and a requirement that agencies contribute to national databases.