Mayor Courts Brady Campaign New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has left no doubt about whom he is courting alliances with on gun issues. Brady Center lawyer Dennis Henigan refers to Bloomberg as “our hero” in today’s New York Times, and the paper also reports the mayor giving a speech to the Brady Campaign just days after his tirade at a House Judiciary Subcommittee meeting where he opposed sound legislation (HR 5005) that would permanently prohibit making traced gun data available to the public. Releasing such information to the public would only jeopardize ongoing criminal investigations and could endanger law enforcement officers, informants and witnesses, says a 2005 congressional appropriations committee report. Furthermore, the mayor’s own police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, expressed similar concerns in a 2002 letter. Nevertheless, the mayor and others are pressing Congress to allow sharing of the gun trace data so that civil suits can be launched against firearms retailers simply because they have sold guns later recovered by police and traced by ATF. "The mayor wrongly assumed every gun recovered and traced was illegally sold by a dealer. That is simply not true, as ATF has repeatedly cautioned. A trace standing alone is evidence of nothing; it may – or may not – be the beginning of a criminal investigation,” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel.