New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg doubled down on his call for stronger gun regulation in the aftermath of the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, telling MSNBC Monday morning that both presidential candidates must explain how they will address gun violence.

“How anybody can run for the highest office in the country where 48,000 people are going to get killed in the next four years and not have a plan. Maybe they do, maybe they have a secret plan to end the war,” Bloomberg said and called for strengthening existing laws and closing loopholes:

JOHN HEILEMANN (NEW YORK MAGAZINE): If you could by fiat have one thing that the federal government could do in terms of central regulation and restriction, what would it be, if you could only do one or two things, what would it be?

BLOOMBERG: Plug the one or two loopholes in the laws they already passed and then fund the enforcement of it. We haven’t had the head of alcohol, tobacco and firearms because the president can’t get anybody through Congress. We don’t have any monies to go and enforce the laws. The states aren’t putting data into the database. There’s a gun show loophole where we require everybody to have a background check but not for casual purposes.

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Both Mitt Romney and President Obama have thus far shied away from calling for greater gun regulation. Romney, who signed an assault weapons ban as Massachusetts governor in 2004, claimed in 2008 that he would have signed a federal extension of the ban, but would not support new legislative restrictions

President Obama has also backed extending the federal assault ban, but actually decreased gun controls during his administration. Obama signed a law “allowing people to carry concealed weapons in the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and other national parks and wildlife refuges and another that lets people carry guns in their checked bags on Amtrak trains.”

Following the tragedy, “White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that the Obama administration has no plans to push new gun control measures.”

But as Bloomberg put it, “people say you shouldn’t address it now because we’re in a time of crisis and mourning. Well, 18 months since Arizona and we did nothing — if not now, when are you going to do this?”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is condemning Tea Party Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX) for suggesting on Friday that the Colorado theater massacre could have been prevented if moviegoers had been armed.

“It does make me wonder, you know, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying? That could have stopped this guy more quickly?” Gohmert said in an interview on The Heritage Foundation’s “Istook Live.” During a taping for CBS’s Face the Nation, Bloomberg — a gun control advocate — shot down the comments:

“You know, to arm everybody and have the Wild West all the time is one of the more nonsensical things you can say,” Bloomberg said, according to an excerpt released by CBS. “I don’t know what [Gohmert’s] motives are, I don’t know him and I’m not here to impugn him or anybody else. It just does not make any sense. The bottom line is if we had fewer guns, we would have a lot fewer murders.”

”Do you really think that you’d be safe if anyone in the audience could pull out a gun and start shooting? I don’t think so,” Bloomberg added.

Bloomberg was the only politician to make the case for stronger gun laws in the aftermath of Friday’s tragedy. “[I]t’s time the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they’re going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country,” he said. “I mean, there’s so many murders with guns every day… No matter where you stand on the Second Amendment, no matter where you stand on guns, we have a right to hear from both of them, concretely, not just in generalities, specifically, what are they going to do about guns?”

The alleged shooter James Holmes used four weapons in the shooting and obtained all of them legally. The AR-15 rife carried by Holmes, a civilian semi-automatic version of the military M-16, would have been defined as a “semiautomatic assault weapon” under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 — which expired in 2004. “The type of ammunition magazine Holmes is accused of using was banned for new production under the old federal assault weapon ban.” Though once it expired, “gun manufacturers flooded the market with the type of high-capacity magazines Holmes used Friday.”

Holmes “purchased ammunition over the Internet, including thousands of rounds and multiple magazines for the assault rifle.