Mike Bloomberg Channels Pauline Kael

Bloomberg: “Most people I know don’t even have a gun.” Perhaps you should diversify your circle of friends, then:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg slammed pro-gun advocates while encouraging America’s other mayors to pressure Congress to pass President Barack Obama’s gun-control proposals, during a lunch gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Friday.

“Most people I know don’t even have a gun,” Bloomberg said, claiming America is “the only industrialized country in the world” that has a gun “problem” where there are more guns than people.

So when will Mayor Mike start writing reviews for the New Yorker?

An apocryphal quote had New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael claim to be surprised by Richard Nixon’s landslide re-election, saying that no one she knew voted for him. That quote gets pulled out on occasion to demonstrate the cluelessness of media and academic elites about the nature of the American mainstream. The actual quote was somewhat more damning:

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

In other words, it’s not an accidental cluelessness, but deliberate snobbery.

We expect a New Yorker writer to be a snob; it’s unfortunate that the city’s current mayor is a far worse one.

Related: “In England, Piers Morgan joked about shooting rivals, said homeowners who kill burglars should not be prosecuted.” But that was before Morgan landed in the US and attempted to use CNN as a springboard to becoming an even more spittle-flecked MSNBC anchor.