Mark Glaze is announcing that he’s stepping down in June:
The executive director of the gun control group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which has emerged as a leading counterweight to the National Rifle Association, said on Wednesday he would step down from the organization in June.
Mark Glaze actually works for a DC-based PR firm called The Raben Group (which you can find out from the poorly redacted E-mails from the NYC FOIA dump). My guess is there isn’t a whole lot to read into this. The Bloomberg organizations have been staffing up, and my guess is they want their own hired staff doing most of the day-to-day work. It almost never makes financial sense to keep using consultants for long term needs, unless they have knowledge so specialized you can’t really hire in for it.
I would imagine another client would be a welcome change of pace for Mark Glaze, regardless of what’s going on. If I had Bloomberg as my client, talking about how his ticket to heaven was assured, and various other missteps, I’d probably quickly develop a serious drinking problem. It’s not just Bloomberg either. Shannon Watts is a walking PR disaster in her own right, as her very ill-considered response to Slide-Fire over the photobomb indicates. Her smartest option was to shrug it off, and she chose to go 180 degrees in the other direction. There’s just a lot of bullshit that goes along with being high-profile in any controversial issue.
As much as I might oppose Bloomberg organizations, they have displaced our previous opponents and set themselves up as the leading opposition in a very short amount of time, which is no easy accomplishment. When Glaze says he “planned to do some consulting,” I’m guessing he’ll be working for another client. As we always do with our opponents who decide to move on, we wish him the best of luck in future endeavors.