WASHINGTON — When a GOP candidate seeking to run against Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly released a recent ad featuring him in a Wild West shootout with Kelly and other prominent Democrats, members of both parties criticized the spot.
Kelly’s wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, formed a gun control advocacy group after surviving a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson in which a gunman killed six people. Senate candidate Jim Lamon posed as an old-time sheriff having a shootout with “the DC gang” in the ad, which aired during halftime of the Super Bowl on Tucson’s NBC affiliate. His campaign subsequently said it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
The controversy comes amid an increase in the death threats that politicians say they face more than a year after a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And with loosening regulations on campaign spending for personal security, congressional campaigns from both parties disclosed nearly $3 million for security-related expenses in 2021, according to a CQ Roll Call analysis of federal election records.
