Ahead of a big Senate hearing this week on an assault weapons ban, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will again be the target of tough new ads in his home state on gun control—reminding voters of the money he’s taking from the industry and his hardline stance against any new reforms.
The new ad, taken out by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, features a Kentucky hunter named Gary who calmly boasts that he only needs one shot to take down a deer, and doesn’t understand why anyone would need high-capacity weapons. He then blames McConnell for blocking reform so he can keep receiving gun industry money. See it here:
As we noted earlier this month, McConnell appears vulnerable on this issue, even in Kentucky, where he faces re-election in 2014. Public Policy Polling found that 82 percent of Kentuckians favor universal background checks (the subject of PCCC’s last ad), and 50 percent favor an assault weapon ban, with 42 percent opposed.
This ad will air on broadcast and cable in Lexington, Louisville, Bowling Green and rural Paducah markets, as well as online across the state. (It will also air in Washington, DC). After this run PCCC will have run $100,000 in gun control ads against McConnell, mainly from small donors.
Gun control is emerging as one of the early themes in McConnell’s re-election, which is still over twenty months out. In January he vowed to block all Obama gun laws in a telephone recording his campaign used to contact voters across the state.
Hell has frozen over! Well, not quite, but Rupert Murdoch has made an excellent argument against the Keystone pipeline, George Zornick writes.
