Mayor Heads for Baltimore Guns Summit

A day after voters cast ballots in presidential primaries in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, Mayor Bloomberg is traveling to the region for a summit on gun violence.

Mr. Bloomberg will appear at Baltimore City Hall with about 10 other mayors, including the mayor of Washington, D.C., Adrian Fenty, for a regional meeting of the coalition he co-founded with Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston in 2006, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

The mayor of Baltimore, Sheila Dixon, is hosting the summit.

The event should keep Mr. Bloomberg, whom some consider a potential presidential hopeful, in the national spotlight, even though he has denied repeatedly that he is a candidate for the White House. A professor of politics at the University of Virginia, Larry Sabato, said Mr. Bloomberg's visit to Baltimore is another sign the mayor is trying to keep his options open, "which is what most politicians do," he added.

"He likes to claim he's not really a politician, but he's a politician just like the rest of them," he said. He said that if Mr. Bloomberg did run for president, his work on gun control might help him win over liberal voters in November, but would make him unpopular in the South and the West.

A spokesman for the mayor of Baltimore, Sterling Clifford, said Ms. Dixon plans to focus today on the relationship between the number of violent crimes in Baltimore and the presence of illegal guns in the city.

"Close to 90% of our homicides are committed with firearms," he said. "The evidence is pretty clear that if you remove firearms from the equation you don't completely solve your violence problem, but you certainly have an impact."

Ms. Dixon is supporting Senator Obama for president, and spoke at a rally he held in Baltimore on Monday.