Mayor of Illinois' Third-Largest City Quits Bloomberg Anti-Gun Group

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-Second Amendment group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, has lost another member, this time the mayor of Rockford, Illinois–the state’s third largest city.

At a townhall-styled appearance on June 22 in nearby Loves Park, Illinois, Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey announced that he has, indeed, quit Mayor Bloomberg’s gun group because Bloomberg’s group was not fulfilling what Morrissey felt was the group’s stated intentions.

Morrissey has for some time been saying he intended to quit the anti-gun group and some citizens wondered if this was just electioneering, but at this most recent townhall event, Mayor Morrissey has for the first time said definitively that he is out.

In the video shot by local political blogger Ulysses Arn, Mayor Morrissey said the chief reason he left Bloomberg’s group is because he thought the group would be against illegal guns but has instead become a group looking for ways to ban legal guns and attack the rights of legal gun owners. He also said that he intends to get a concealed carry license himself when they become available in Illinois.

Morrissey also made a salient point about the sort of guns Bloomberg’s group keeps harping on. The mayor pointed out that the sort of gun crime he sees in Rockford has nothing whatever to do with “assault rifles” but is instead criminal use of handguns. Yet Bloomberg’s group seems chiefly interested in so-called assault rifles despite the fact that little crime is committed by criminals using assault rifles.

Morrissey told the audience that his name still appears on the Bloomberg website but he is trying to get it to removed.

As noted above, the mayor said that he intends to get a concealed carry license himself as soon as the law in Illinois is put in place. He points to death threats he’s received as the reason and notes that the police can’t always be there to protect him. For this reason, therefore, he is in favor of everyone having the right to carry.

Rockford is the third largest city in Illinois with a population of 180,569, a median age of 30-years, and a 39 percent minority population.

Unfortunately, Rockford also has some of the highest crime in Illinois and was featured as the 19th most dangerous cities in the country in a 2011 Forbes article.