It’s been a rough spring and summer so far for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun prohibition group Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG).

MAIG shed their carefully-constructed moderate camouflage after Newtown, and helped author and ram through a wave of prohibitive gun laws in Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, and New York. The group, often fronted solely by Mayor Bloomberg, also roared for intrusive federal guns laws as well, and financially supported a number of new “astroturf” gun control groups calling for “commonsense” gun control.  MAIG and their fake-grassroots offshoots were stymied when support for federal laws died in the U.S. House and Senate.

Suddenly, the ferocity and scope of the group’s deception became a problem. They weren’t “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” at all, but instead, “Mayors Against All Guns,” and politicians associated with the group began slinking, and sometimes running away:

After six months of the increasingly hysterical behavior that has marked MAIG’s first forays, its membership appears to be cottoning on to the ruse. The mayor of Rockford, Ill., Lawrence Morrissey, who was for a brief time on board with Bloomberg’s stated agenda, put his disillusionment well. “The reason that I joined the group in the first place,” he explained contritely at a town-hall meeting on June 22 this year, “is because I took the name for what it said — against ‘illegal’ guns.” But “as the original mission swayed,” Morrissey continued, he decided that “it was no longer in line with my beliefs.” His audience applauded this revelation.

Morrissey is one of 50 or so mayors who have left Bloomberg’s group since February this year. “I was never an active member,” Sioux City mayor Bob Scott nervously made clear while justifying his decision to pull out earlier this year. “They’re not just against illegal guns, they’re against all guns.” In July, the mayor of Nashua, N.H., Donnalee Lozeau, struck a similar note, revealing in an interview with the Manchester Union Leader that she had scolded Bloomberg for going after Senator Kelly Ayotte: “You’re Mayors Against Illegal Guns; you’re not Mayors for Gun Control!”

“Mayors Against All Guns” is indeed the true purpose of the group, as long as you aren’t talking about the personal phalanx of armed bodyguards for Bloomberg himself.

At the end of the day, it seems obvious that “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” doesn’t even really represent the 5-percent of U.S. mayors in deeply anti-gun areas that they claim to represent.

“Mayors Against All Guns” increasingly appears to be nothing more than the personal vanity project of a spoiled billionaire who thinks his vast wealth gives him the legitimacy to lord over the rights of his fellow citizens.

MAIG is falling apart, and Bloomberg has no one but himself to blame.