The home page for Mayors Against Illegal Guns features a webcrawl listing more than 1,000 U.S. cities and towns whose mayors are members of the pro-gun-control organization.

Butler used to be included on this list. Butler is not on the list anymore.

That’s because former Mayor Maggie Stock counted herself a member of MAIG, which was founded eight years ago by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s $2.9 million contribution makes him MAIG’s largest financial supporter, too.

In a new video of its own producing, the National Rifle Association takes credit for helping Tom Donaldson defeat Stock. While Donaldson makes no secret he’s an advocate for Second Amendment gun rights, the new mayor is not an NRA member and he did not ask the NRA for help with his campaign.

But he got help anyway. In its eight-minute video, released Jan. 15 on You Tube, the NRA explained how it targeted Butler and 23 other cities whose incumbent mayoral candidates had signed the MAIG statement of support. Mailings to NRA members in Butler alerted them to Stock’s affiliation with MAIG and Donaldson’s pro-gun position.

It was clever to link Stock to Bloomberg, to make her a part of his “nanny state,” limiting the size of soft drinks and posting nutrition data at fast food restaurants — and portraying Donaldson as the champion of free-thinking patriots far from the Big Government machines of New York and Washington.

However, the NRA is presumptuous, at best, insinuating it propelled Donaldson is victory. The election did not turn on gun rights. Guns were not an issue. Neither candidate publicly discussed guns during the campaign. Neither has proposed anything related to arms.

The prominent issues were crime, security, housing and economic redevelopment. Donaldson, a former police officer, astutely ran on a law-and-order ticket, contending any efforts toward prosperity would be fruitless without first establishing security.

Running from that platform, Donaldson defeated Stock by a margin of two to one. NRA support might account for a small fraction of Donaldson’s votes, but certainly not a majority.

Regardless, the NRA and its most energetic acolytes will regard everything as it pertains to gun rights. In their world, the most fleeting suggestion of more thorough background checks, or introduction of any background checks at gun shows, is a direct assault on the Second Amendment.

As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, every issue is a nail. And the NRA wields one massive hammer.

But in this case, the NRA did not decide Butler’s mayoral race. The people of Butler figured it out on their own.