Mayor Bloomberg may be struggling to win more anti-terrorism money from Washington, but he is having more luck working with the City Council on his local security plans.

In the latest chapter of his war against illegal guns, Mr. Bloomberg is targeting companies that sell paints in happy colors like red, yellow, and pink to refinish guns.

Mr. Bloomberg and the council speaker, Christine Quinn, yesterday announced four new gun control measures, including a bill that would outlaw paints that can be used to make guns look like toys. So far, no brightly colored guns have been confiscated in the city.

“People will do a lot of twisted things to make a buck,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday at a news conference during which he held up a yellow gun and a red gun and asked reporters to guess which one was fake.

On the federal funding front, Mr. Bloomberg shot a blank yesterday when he asked federal officials to reverse their 40% cut of the city’s antiterrorism funds. The mayor had a 40-minute phone conversation with the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff.

Mr. Chertoff did not reverse course. But the mayor’s spokesman, Stuart Loeser, said the secretary committed to having his agency “expedite” New York’s future funding requests. Mr. Chertoff also said funds for higher risk cities might increase once smaller cities beef up security.

Earlier yesterday, the city’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, said he had learned that only 25% of the formula used to calculate the grant money focused on the city’s risk factor. Mr. Kelly criticized the committee of anonymous members the government convened to make the latest funding decisions, saying it unjustly shifted the responsibility away from the Department of Homeland Security.

He also said that even if the government had a problem with New York’s application – as federal au thorities have suggested – it had no logical reason to cut funding to a city that has already been targeted by terrorists.

Mr. Kelly compared the decision to grammar school, where teachers send back papers when students don’t use the proper headings.

“That’s not acceptable,” he said. “We’re in the big leagues here.You just can’t use that as an excuse.”

Meanwhile, Senator Schumer said he would introduce a bill mandating that homeland security grants be dished out on a risk-only basis. The legislation would require Homeland Security officials to tell members of Congress who represent high-risk regions how much money their districts are getting 30 days before the amounts are finalized.

Mr. Schumer also vowed to look for other sources of funding to make up New York’s losses this year.

Mr. Bloomberg’s local security measures have been at odds with the Bush administration.The mayor has been aggressively pushing local laws that he says will reduce shootings in the city, while the Republicans in Congress wants to restrict gun trace data-sharing between municipalities.

The latest package of anti-gun legislation would establish a registry to track New Yorkers convicted of criminal gun possession, require city gun dealers to report any missing or stolen guns, and limit handgun purchases to one every three months.

Mr. Bloomberg has created a coalition of 50 mayors to fight for tougher guns laws and sued 15 dealers outside New York.

The owner of the Lauer Custom Weaponry in Chippewa Fall, Wis., said the mayor should have other things to do than come up with “strange” laws barring his paint products. The owner, Steven Lauer, said the paints are used for search and rescue teams and gun competition are not meant to make gun look like toys as the mayor contends.