Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, who has flooded the airways with ads attacking President Trump, is trying a different approach with a spot during the Super Bowl: His newest ad will focus on a mother whose son was shot and killed.

Bloomberg, who founded the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, is predominantly relying on ads to propel his presidential candidacy. On Sunday — a day before the Iowa caucuses, where Bloomberg is not on the ballot — he will reach his biggest audience yet. More than 100 million people watched last year’s Super Bowl, according to Nielsen ratings.

Long the domain of high-priced and highly produced commercials hyping cars and beer, this year’s game in Miami will have a dose of politics, with spots from Bloomberg and President Trump’s reelection campaign. Fox Sports executives have said the network is selling 30-second ads during the contest between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs for more than $5 million each.

Bloomberg’s new ad does not mention the president. It features a Texas woman, Calandrian Simpson Kemp, talking about how her son, George H. Kemp Jr., started playing football at age 4, with photos of him holding football gear as a baby and child.

https://www.houstonpress.com/news/on-national-gun-violence-awareness-day-families-recount-the-aftermath-and-push-for-change-8452647

At 12:30 a.m. on a November night in 2013, a policeman knocked on Jacquelyn Burke's door to tell her that her son was dead.

He was found fatally shot in a park, 20 years old. Burke says the young men charged with killing him were his best friends from high school, the boys he played on the football team with. She still doesn't know why they killed her son, Harley, or what happened that night, and she won't until the trial. But by now, Burke is done staying at home. She still grieves her son every day, and turns on Fried Green Tomatoes whenever she needs to cry. But Burke has found ways to channel the pain into a cause, she said — it's why she came out on a stormy evening to Highland Park in honor of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, and in honor of Harley.

About 75 people packed into the park's community room, all wearing orange, the cause's official color. Many were with Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America, while about a dozen had lost loved ones to gun violence. The Houston Health Department had come, acknowledging that the city considered gun violence to be a public health dilemma; and so did the president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Fernando Stein. From the podium, he reminded the crowd that America was a country home to more guns than citizens, a country that was outraged by the tragic shooting death of a gorilla — while the roughly 300 other gun deaths every day since then have mostly quietly faded from public consciousness following their 30-second slots on the local evening news.

"We are a society that is sensitive," he said, "but we are in this rhythm of violence, and we are unsure how to get out." To loud applause, he later added, "The only wrong thing to do is to do nothing."