Here Is David Berkowitz’s Unnecessary Contribution to the Gun-Control Debate

Berkowitz.

Today's most disturbing gun-control debate contributor: David Berkowitz, a.k.a. Son of Sam, the serial killer who shot six people to death (and wounded seven) in New York in the late seventies. In a jail cell interview with the New York Daily News, Berkowitz — who is serving six consecutive 25-years-to-life sentences — said, "Society has to take the glory out of guns." He seemed less focused on the crimes that pushed the topic of firearms back into the news recently — the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin — and more interested in the "gangbanging teens and wanna-bes" he's encountered during his time in prison. "My hope is just that young people would understand just how terrible this violence is. When they use a gun against someone else, they ruin their lives too," he said. "It’s not worth it." Neither, perhaps, is speaking to David Berkowitz about guns, but there you have it.

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Bloomberg Wants to Reframe the Gun Control Debate

After the mass shooting in Aurora, Mayor Bloomberg has gone on the offensive as an advocate for gun control, but he's also well aware of the political realities, going so far as to avoid the actual term. Capital New York points out today that the mayor is careful to refer to "crime control" instead of the loaded "gun control," with a focus on background checks and legal loopholes, and even named his anti-gun organization Mayors Against Illegal Guns, instead of something that sounds more aggressive toward the Second Amendment. To beat the NRA, Bloomberg knows, he has to first help change the conversation.

Speaking to the Huffington Post today, the mayor reprised the comparison between his gun efforts and Grover Norquist's anti-tax movement. "It is probably true that you could create a liberal equivalent of the NRA or Grover Norquist," Bloomberg said. "But nobody's done it yet, and when they've tried to do it, it hasn't really worked." (A poll found the Colorado massacre had no effect on Americans' feelings about gun laws.)

Although he's more than willing to show up on every political talk show, Bloomberg knows he can't do it alone. He needs a paradigm-shifting mastermind: "Now, why does Fox News work and MSNBC doesn't? I don't know. I've asked people," Bloomberg said. "I think somebody that really understands television like [Fox News'] Roger Ailes would say that one side is more committed than the other. I don't know if that's true. But I've always thought to myself, if you could hire Roger Ailes, pay him $100 billion, and say, 'Hey, go create left wing television.' Could he do it? And I think yes, he would."

If only someone had a media company, piles of money, and was going to be out of a job soon ...

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Three High School Girls Amass Nearly 175,000 Signatures in Push for Female Presidential Debate Moderator

First and only woman to moderate a presidential debate.

It's now been 20 years since a woman, in this case ABC News' Carole Simpson, moderated a presidential debate — the 1992 three-way event pitting the incumbent, Bush Senior, against Bill "The Comeback Kid" Clinton and independent (chart-loving) candidate Ross Perot. For Montclair, New Jersey rising juniors Emma Axelrod, Sammi Siegel and Elena Tsemberis, 20 years is long enough. On Monday, the three students showed up in Washington D.C. intent on presenting the Commission on Presidential Debates with two Change.org petitions calling for a female moderator, and totaling nearly 175,000 signatures. But the commission's executive director, Janet Brown, refused to meet with the trio, Axelrod told NPR this afternoon. In fact, Axelrod said that, "we were turned away and we were not allowed to leave our packages there either, in case they contained dangerous material."

This setback came as a big disappointment to the girls, especially after they'd alerted the commission to their visit last Friday and after Brown told CBS News they were guaranteed a meeting with a staff member, at the very least. Also boding poorly for the girls' campaign are Brown's defensive comments that nine of the general election moderators-slash-panel members since 1988 have been women, to 12 men. But presidential debates expert and Northwestern professor Alan Schroeder tells McClatchy Newspapers he thinks the commission will ultimately choose a female moderator when it makes its announcement sometime in August, and in no small part thanks to Axelrod, Siegel, and Tsemberis' petitions.

So don't despair quite yet. We may still see a Rachel Maddow or Greta Van Susteren (or, more likely, PBS's Gwen Ifill) moderating the fall's Obama-versus-Romney showdown.

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