Did Mitt Romney Avoid Investments in Gun Companies?

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I just saw a segment on MSNBC with Time’s Michael Crowley, who said that although Mitt Romney generally didn’t care much about the moral consequences of his investments at Bain Capital (layoffs, pension fund raids, etc.), he did have moral qualms about making certain kinds of investments in the first place. Crowley says that Romney felt there were plenty of places to make money, which meant Bain didn’t have to get involved in some of the more noxious ones.

Among those areas that Romney avoided was making investments in gun companies, many of which were attractive targets in the 80s and 90s. That’s interesting! Has anyone else reported this before? Is it true? Did Romney really have moral qualms — as opposed to financial qualms — about putting Bain’s money into Colt and Winchester and other arms manufacturers? I’d like to hear more about this.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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