Michael Bloomberg-founded Everytown for Gun Safety reportedly distanced itself from Bloomberg following the publication of his comments in defense of stop and frisk.

On February 11, 2020, Breitbart News reported a speech Bloomberg gave at the Aspen Institute wherein he defended his strategy of aggressively policing minority neighborhoods. He gave the speech in 2015, and a recording of it is now seizing public attention.

The Aspen Times quoted Bloomberg as saying, “Cities need to get guns out of [the] … hands” of individuals who are “male, minority, and between the ages of 15 and 25.” In the full audio of the speech, he bluntly said of young minorities, “Throw them against the wall and frisk them” and admitted that they “put all the cops in minority neighborhoods … because that’s where all the crime is.”

Also, on February 11, 2020, Breitbart News reported excerpts of a 2013 interview with WOR during which Bloomberg said:

One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, “Oh it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group” being targeted by the city’s stop-and-frisk policies. That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.

On February 14, 2020, WAMU noted that Everytown for Gun Safety released a statement distancing itself from Bloomberg.

Everytown was founded as an umbrella group of sorts, absorbing Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns and sharing a gun control agenda with Bloomberg-funded Moms Demand Action.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.