In a gracious and polite letter, AFT President Randi Weingarten asked Mayor Bloomberg to apologize for likening the New York City United Federation of Teachers to the National Rifle Association:
January 6, 2013
Mayor Michael Bloomberg
City Hall
New York, NY
Dear Mr. Mayor:
There are times when we say things in the heat of the moment that we regret. I hope that is the case with the comments you made on Friday during your radio show comparing the NRA with the UFT. They were offensive and way over the line. I strongly urge you to apologize to the thousands of UFT members and their leaders for making such incendiary and insensitive remarks—especially coming on the heels of the tragedy in Newtown.
You know full well that UFT members and other school employees do everything they can to make their schools safe and secure places so that children can learn and thrive. As educators, they take a solemn vow to keep their students safe. The instinct to protect, to serve and to love children is at the core of every educator and school employee. That’s why it is so disturbing and beneath the dignity of your leadership to compare educators or their union to the NRA—a group that promotes allowing terrorists to own guns; lobbies state legislatures to allow concealed guns in elementary schools, day care centers and on college campuses; and has worked closely with ALEC on getting 26 state legislatures to adopt shoot-first laws.
The educators, custodians and school secretaries of Newtown are members of the AFT, including three who died or were injured protecting children from this unspeakable tragedy. I have spent several days in Newtown with educators, parents and members of the community since that awful day. One of the first things I did was call the president of the UFT, Michael Mulgrew, on the day of the killings to ask for UFT’s assistance in helping to provide grief counseling to our Newtown colleagues. The UFT was one of the first organizations on the ground to provide these vital services, and the help is ongoing.
Mr. Mayor, we have worked together for many years. We have enjoyed a relationship based on mutual respect and being honest with one another. Whatever collective bargaining differences you currently are facing with the UFT—and during our time working together we had many ups and downs—it is neither appropriate nor responsible for you to compare the UFT with the NRA.
No one has taken on the NRA more aggressively than you, which also is why your radio comments were so disturbing. It undermines the great work you have done on gun safety to draw this comparison. For all these reasons, I ask you to make a public apology.
Sincerely,
Randi Weingarten
President, American Federation of Teachers
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The only thing that could have made me sympathize with Bloomberg on this issue is an insipid request for an apology that nobody would believe anyway.
Kudos, Ms. Weingarten.
Much of the blame for the catastrophic situation facing NYC teachers – school closings and constant destabilization, loss of seniority, the weakening of tenure, mayoral dictatorship, et. al. – is directly attributable to Ms. Weingarten’s “collaboration” (her word, not mine) with this vicious man.
Are we now to applaud this obsequious appeal, obviously written to cover herself in the face of her angry and/or demoralized members?
No they are probably out to dinner and drinks while laughing about the entire episode.
Did he apologize yet?
We may not have a lot of sympathy for Randi, but she was right to call for an apology. She would accomplish nothing with histrionic outrage. Perhaps her reasoned response will result in an apology that NYC teachers deserve.
If you think this wasn’t histrionic outrage, you didn’t read her characterization of the NRA.
But her response is totally based on a biased, wrong-headed, mischaracterization of the NRA.
“a group that promotes allowing terrorists to own guns; lobbies state legislatures to allow concealed guns in elementary schools, day care centers and on college campuses; and has worked closely with ALEC on getting 26 state legislatures to adopt shoot-first laws.”
Her first point is a meaningless empty canard and can be dismissed. The other two points are true, and worth approval. If the principal of Sandy Hook school had been carrying the day A*** L**** shot his way through the locked glass door of the school, she could have dropped him before he got any further. That would have been a good thing. As for ALEC, the stand your ground legislation is NOT a “shoot first” law.
So your beloved sweetie, Randi Weingarten has just got her premise all wrong.
But more fundamentally, all Bloomberg meant was that the rank and file of the UFT didn’t agree with its leadership, just as, he postulated, the rank and file of the NRA doesn’t really support the position of its national leadership. Bloomberg is totally wrong about that, of course. I suspect he’s also wrong about what he hopes is a fracture between the UFT leadership and the rank and file.
So, Randi Weingarten is wrong about the NRA, Bloomberg is wrong about the NRA and probably the UFT, and most of the other followers of this blog have got it wrong in accepting the NRA as a metonymy for ultimate evil. Gun homicides are at the bottom of the list of causes of death in the USA and most of those are between gang members anyway, and they don’t count because they’re already crooks.
The members of the NRA are just a few cowboy wanna be’s who like to break clay pigeons on weekends, bring down an occasional source of venison, and be secure in their homes and in their persons. There’s nothing the least sinister in that—-unless you are a thief, rapist, or a foreign power seeking to take over the United States from within and without. Yes, the NRA might represent a threat to those who want to terrify the population into submission. But there’s no one here interested in aligning themselves with THEM,, except our delightfully honest Communist Teacher, is there?
FYI, again–the shooter was fully outfitted in Kevlar, so it’s very possible that only highly trained law officers could have taken him down. I believe the Aurora shooter was outfitted in bullet-proof garb, as well.
Once again, Wayne LaPierre, makes sense.
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I don’t know the context of the mayor’s comments, but if he likened the lobbying and tactics of the UFT to those of the NRA, then he is spot on, as evidenced by her characterization of the NRA.
Reading her letter, one would think that the shooter (when will we learn to quit glorifying these people by using their names and faces???) was a member of and carrying out the official policies of the NRA. I suspect that the truth is that there are members of the NRA also “do everything they can to make their schools safe and secure places so that children can learn and thrive.”
Has the Mayor replied?