Bloomberg to tout gun control record in Super Bowl ad

Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg will tout his gun control record in an $11 million ad set to air during the Super Bowl on Sunday, The New York Times reports.

The 60-second spot features Calandrian Kemp, a Texas woman whose 20-year-old son, George Jr., was shot and killed in 2013 during an argument on his college campus.

“I just kept saying, you cannot tell me that the child I gave birth to is no longer here,” Kemp says in the spot. Text then appears reading “2,900 children die from gun violence every year,” a figure frequently cited by Everytown for Gun Safety, which derives most of its funding from Bloomberg.

Kemp goes on to say, “I know Mike is not afraid of the gun lobby, they’re scared of him, and they should be.”

The former New York City mayor entered the presidential race too late for the initial primaries and has blanketed the airwaves with a series of self-funded ads, with a goal of a strong Super Tuesday showing.

Advertising during the Super Bowl, which is expected to draw about 100 million viewers for the game and the broadcast’s highly anticipated commercials, reflects a similar strategy, Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson told the Times.

“It’s a time when people get together and they sit down and they watch the Super Bowl, but they also know that there are these ads and there’s a lot of conversation about the ads,” he said. “It’s a very wide net, it’s a broad swath of Americans, and this is an issue that there’s been an awful lot of agreement on.”