Super Bowl mayors star in gun control ad

Mayors Michael Bloomberg of New York and Thomas Menino of Boston, whose football teams play in the Super Bowl Feb. 5, will appear in a television commercial during the game to call for a crackdown on illegal gun sales. The two city chief executives are co-chairmen of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of more than 600 they founded in 2006. They will dress in the jerseys of the National Football League’s New York Giants and New England Patriots and play on the regional sports rivalry, spokesmen for the two mayors said. “There’s not much opportunity to have fun with a topic like this, so with the two teams competing against each other, the mayors, as founders of the coalition, thought they would take advantage of the large audience to get their message across,” said John Guilfoil, a spokesman for Menino. Last year’s Super Bowl XLV between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers attracted 111 million viewers and was the top individual telecast of 2011, according to Nielsen, which measures media audiences. The 30-second commercial will run regionally, not nationally, Guilfoil said in a telephone interview. The coalition will spend “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on the spot, said Marc LaVorgna, a Bloomberg spokesman, in a news release...more