NRA launches $1.3 million ad buy for Cotton

LITTLE ROCK — The National Rifle Association on Tuesday said it's launching a $1.3 million television ad campaign to promote Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton's bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, a little over a year after the group ran radio ads defending Pryor's record on guns.

The NRA said the 30-second spot will begin running in Little Rock and Jonesboro starting Wednesday and will run for at least four weeks. The ad touts the group's endorsement of Cotton and doesn't mention Pryor. The group is also spending six figures to run radio ads in the state and has been sending direct mail pieces promoting Cotton's bid, spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said.

"Tom Cotton protected your rights in Congress, and abroad as a combat veteran," a narrator says in the ad. "In the Senate, Cotton will stand up to President Obama's extreme gun control agenda."

The spot is the latest in an increasingly expensive Senate fight that Republican says is key to their goal of winning a majority in that chamber. Combined, the two candidates and outside groups have spent more than $23.7 million on the race, according to the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation. Pryor was first elected in 2002 and is the only Democrat in Arkansas' congressional delegation. Cotton is a freshman congressman representing the 4th District in southern Arkansas.

Arulanandam said the group will likely roll out more ads focusing on the Arkansas Senate race.

Last summer, months before Cotton launched his bid, the group aired a radio spot thanking Pryor for his vote against expanded background checks for firearms purchases. The ad was aimed at pushing back against a TV ad by the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which was co-founded by then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The gun control group's spot invoked the 2008 shooting death of state Democratic Party Chairman Bill Gwatney.

Pryor used the first TV ad of his re-election bid to defend the vote last summer.

"No one from New York or Washington tells me what to do. I listen to Arkansas," Pryor said at the end of the ad.

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