During New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s first year in office, the New York Police Department stopped and interrogated 97,296 people on the streets. By 2007, with the Bloomberg administration pushing the a stop-and-frisk strategy, police made more than a half a million stops. Last year, the figure rose to a record 685,724 people. And according to a New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) report, the vast majorities of stops — about 87 percent — were of blacks and Latinos. Despite robust defenses of the tactics, they appear to be less effective than the Bloomberg administration and NYPD claim.

Most troubling, the NYCLU report seemed to bear out charges of racial profiling in stop-and-frisk situations. In precincts where blacks and Latinos are least represented among the population (14 percent or less), blacks and Latinos were nonetheless the target of 70 percent of stops. Perhaps most staggeringly, the the Wall Street Journal highlighted that the number of stops of black men between the ages of 14 and 24 (168,126 ) exceeded the total city population of black men in that age range (158,406).

Along with the wildly disproportionate stops, blacks and Latinos were more likely to get frisked. Yet they yielded a smaller percentage of weapons than whites. The NYCLU produced these charts demonstrating the disparities:

On Bloomberg’s weekly radio show last month, Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended the stop-and-frisk strategy, whose increased application they credit with a 50 percent drop in the city’s murder rate, but it’s not at all clear how this strategy produced such an outcome. Comparing 2003 and 2011, stops increased by more than half a million while only 172 more guns were found. That’s a jump of finding one gun for every 266 stops versus one gun per every 3,000 stops.

Mitt Romney’s held many positions on guns. As a candidate for governor of Massachusetts, Romney offered unequivocal support for gun regulation: “We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts — I support them. I won’t chip away at them. I believe they help protect us, and provide for our safety.” As governor, he made these laws even stronger, signing into law a permanent ban on assault rifles.

As a presidential candidate, however, Romney morphed into a gun owner and NRA member who told the gun lobbying group that President Obama is waging an “assault on our freedoms.”

The same thing can be said about Romney’s views on immigration. During the GOP presidential primary, Romney frequently staked out the most extreme position on immigration of any of the major candidates. He promised to make undocumented immigrants’ lives so miserable that they flee the country. He promised to veto the DREAM Act, and he even campaigned with the author of Alabama and Arizona’s harsh immigration laws — on Martin Luther King Day. Romney started backtracking away from those positions as well, once he locked down his party’s nomination.

Romney may now be preparing to Etch-a-Sketch his views on guns and immigration even further. The GOP candidate is currently courting an endorsement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one the nation’s leading advocates for both gun regulation and liberalized immigration policy:

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have reached a rare consensus: They are both determined to score the endorsement of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, whose name is all but synonymous with Wall Street clout and nonpartisan politics.

On Tuesday, Romney showed up at the mayor’s philanthropic foundation in Manhattan for a secret breakfast meeting. Over coffee and juice, Romney made clear that he was there to pick the mayoral brain: “Tell me what’s on your mind,” he told Bloomberg, according to aides briefed on the 30-minute discussion, which touched on immigration, gun control and education policy.

However, Bloomberg is not simply a supporter of more robust gun regulation — he may be the nation’s leading advocate on these issues. The Mayor supports closing loopholes so that everyone who buys a gun undergoes a background check. He led a national charge to roll back the so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws that played such a significant role in the Trayvon Martin tragedy. And he co-chairs Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which describes ensuring criminals do not illegally obtain guns as a matter of “life and death.”

Similarly, Bloomberg is a major supporter of the kinds of progressive immigration policies Romney shunned as a primary candidate. Bloomberg proudly describes New York as America’s most immigrant-friendly city. He expanded legal services in his city for immigrants. And he once described our current, restrictive immigration policies as “suicide.”

Now, let’s be clear. Bloomberg is right, and Romney has at times been very wrong, on both the need for sensible gun regulation and the need to repair our immigration policy. If Bloomberg succeeds in convincing Romney to abandon some of his past views, that would be a very positive development, regardless of who Bloomberg ultimately winds up endorsing.

Given Romney’s long history of Etch-a-Sketching, however, it is unlikely that any position Romney announces today will remain his position tomorrow — especially after his uncertain allies in the NRA and the anti-immigrant community react to Romney’s announcement in disgust.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) launched a national grassroots campaign today aimed at putting an end to laws like the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law that left Trayvon Martin dead and George Zimmerman a free man. At a press conference in Washington, DC, Bloomberg, along with Florida lawmakers and civil rights leaders, called on Florida to repeal ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws (which Bloomberg characterized as ‘Shoot First’ laws) and for other states to repeal or prevent similar Shoot First laws.

Mayor Bloomberg heavily criticized the National Rifle Association for their involvement in passing Shoot First laws, which often immunizes people who feel their life is being threatened if they shoot their perceived assailant:

Florida was the NRA’s first target, and it succeeded in pushing the bill through the legislature over the objections of leading police and law enforcement… In reality, the NRA’s leaders weren’t interested in public safety. They were interesting in promoting a culture where people take the law into their own hands and face no consequences for it. Let’s call that by its real name: Vigilantism.

Watch it:

Civil rights leaders from the NAACP, National Urban League, VoteVets, and ColorOfChange took up the banner of Mayor Bloomberg’s “Second Chance On Shoot First” push. At the press conference, they stressed the importance of Shoot First repeal and prevention, as well as the need to hold the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) accountable for its role in prioritizing and pushing such laws.

Florida, where Trayvon Martin was killed, is one of twenty five states where Shoot First laws exist. Bloomberg exposed exactly how dangerous they can be, citing the steep jump in justifiable homicides — cases where a person who kills someone else is deemed to be legally justified in doing so. ThinkProgress generated a graph from those numbers:

A website was launched in conjunction with Bloomberg’s announcement today. Along with giving details on which state legislators supported a version of a Shoot First bill, it has a petition which read, “I strongly encourage all elected officials who originally supported these laws to consider the evidence and call for reform.”

Appearing on Meet the Press this morning, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed bewilderment at the many lawmakers in Washington who continue sabotage existing gun laws:

BLOOMBERG: You’d think that if a congresswoman got shot in the head, that would have changed Congress’ views. I can tell you how to change it, just get Congress to come with me to the hospital when I’ve got tell tell somebody that their son or daughter, their spouse, their parent is not going to come home again. This past, this week, even though the murder rate in New York is so much lower than almost every big city, we still had a cop shot last week with a gun that somebody had even though the federal laws prohibited that person from having a gun.

You know, the federal laws say you can’t get a gun if you have a drug problem, psychiatric problems, criminal record or [if you are] a minor. And yet Congress doesn’t give moneys to make sure we can have a background check. They have too many loopholes. The background databases aren’t up to date. Private sector sales of guns are something like 40 percent and they don’t do background checks, I don’t know who has to get killed for people to start saying ‘wait a second, this is enough.’

Watch it:

If anything, the picture in Congress is even bleaker than Bloomberg suggests. In 2006, the NRA successfully lobbied Congress to make the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) a Senate-confirmed position. Since then, the Senate has been unable to confirm anyone to serve as the chief enforcer of firearms laws due to the combination of gun lobbying and the nearly-unbreakable filibuster. President Obama’s nominee was blocked because he opposes allowing civilians to purchase a weapon capable of punching a baseball-sized hole in 2.5 inches of bulletproof glass.

Not content simply to erect barriers to enforcing federal firearms laws, much of Congress also wants to strip states of their power to enforce reasonable gun regulations. The House recently passed the “National Right To Carry Reciprocity Act,” which forces nearly every state to honor concealed carry licenses issued by the states with the laxest licensing rules. Half of North Carolina concealed carry permit holders with felony convictions have been allowed to keep their permits, and Florida issued 1,700 concealed carry permits to people with “criminal histories, arrest warrants, domestic violence injunctions and misdemeanor convictions for gun-related crimes.” Under this NRA-sponsored bill, all of these permit holders who be allowed to carry concealed firearms in 49 of the 50 states.

Nor are federal lawmakers the only ones looking for new and more creative ways to arm the nation. Several states are pushing efforts to force colleges to allow concealed firearms on campus — because clearly what America needs are rooms full of fraternity members packing heat right after they each consumed a case of Milwaukee’s Best. Not to be outdone, Colorado lawmakers are pushing a bill to allow firearms in elementary schools.

As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explained in D.C. v. Heller, respecting the Second Amendment does not mean filling every building with firearms, or eliminating concealed carry rules, or placing guns in the hands of convicted felons or the mentally ill. Sadly, far too many lawmakers have let the NRA convince them that the myth of the Second Amendment far exceeds the reality.