Former New York City mayor and current gun control sugar daddy Michael Bloomberg dropped tens of millions of dollars on a pair of ads that ran during Sunday night’s Super Bowl, but as Second Amendment researcher Dr. John Lott notes at Townhall, the Democrat presidential candidate’s ads attacking the right to keep and bear arms and promising new restrictions was full of misleading claims and erroneous information.

One ad focused on the Trolley Square Shooting in Utah in 2015. Kait Hinkley movingly talked about losing her sister in that attack, as well as the permanent disabilities suffered by her mother. The mass shooting is unquestionably a tragedy, but as Lott points out, Bloomberg’s ad left out some pretty important details, including the fact that the attack took place in a “gun free zone.”

Fortunately, an off-duty police officer was carrying his gun. He did so in violation of the posted signs.

Ken Hammond, an off-duty officer from Ogden, Utah, was on a different floor and at the opposite end of the mall. It took him three minutes to arrive at the scene, at which point he cornered the gunman and exchanged fire until other officers arrived. “There is no question that his quick actions saved the lives of numerous other people,” Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank said.

Incredibly, Hammond endured lengthy hearings and had to pay hefty legal fees. His career as an officer was on the line. While Hammond eventually kept his job, his ordeal is likely to make others think twice now about ignoring gun-free zone prohibitions.

Unlike Bloomberg, the Trolley Square Mall learned its lesson and took down the gun-free zone signs after the attack. If only someone had been even closer to the attack, then perhaps Hinckley’s sister and mother might have been protected.

Bloomberg’s second ad claimed that “2,900 children die from gun violence every year,” which Lott says is simply untrue.

Unfortunately, Bloomberg’s ad doesn’t provide a source for this claim. From 2013 to 2017 — the most recent five years for which data are available — total murders, suicides and accidental deaths of non-adults averaged 1,900 per year. This is not an insignificant number, but Bloomberg’s figure is off by a thousand deaths a year.

The overwhelming majority of non-adult murders involving drug gangs, and nearly all of the victims are teenagers. Drug dealers are the primary source of illegal guns. Since they can’t go to the police for help in their turf wars, gangs need firearms to protect their valuable property.

As Lott points out, Bloomberg’s arguments are long on emotion and short on facts. Even as a growing number of academics are actually rejecting the broad, sweeping gun control laws aimed at legal gun owners in favor of policies targeting the most likely offenders and victims of gun-related crimes, Bloomberg is pushing a platform that treats America’s 100,000,000 gun owners as if they are the problem. That’s because to Bloomberg and other anti-gun activists, we are the problem, and if Bloomberg or another anti-gun Democrat wins the White House in November, we’ll be the ones paying the price for the actions of violent criminals.