New York is already a gun grabber’s wet dream of restrictions. What more can they really do?
Lawmakers in Albany consider how to make tight gun laws even tighter.
New York lawmakers are reviewing options to strengthen the state’s already muscular gun laws, with Gov. Kathy Hochul expected to unveil a package as soon as Wednesday aimed at shoring up remaining weaknesses in the aftermath of the Buffalo massacre.
At an appearance with President Biden in Buffalo on Tuesday, Ms. Hochul suggested that leaders should not merely blame “hateful philosophies” that she said had leached from dark corners of the web to mainstream cable news shows.
“You could have that hate in your heart, and you can sit in your house and foment these evil thoughts, but you can’t act on it — unless you have a weapon,” she said, adding: “That’s the intersection of these two crises in our nation right now.”
You can use a car, a bomb, you can get a gun illegally. Criminals do not care. But, the gun grabbers will use any excuse. Interestingly, the same lawmakers, and Gov Hochul, won’t be giving up their own armed security.
New York already has some of America’s strictest gun control laws, including requirements for background checks, restrictions on assault rifles, and red flag laws. New York has one of the lowest rates of gun death and injury in the country, according to the nonprofit New Yorkers Against Gun Violence.
Red flag laws? Background checks? Those failed, despite the loony being investigated for serious threats
“You just want to close every potential loophole,” said Assemblywoman Amy Paulin of Westchester.
Ms. Paulin is the sponsor of a number of bills she believes would help make New York safer. One would require local law enforcement agencies to promptly contribute information on recovered weapons to a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives database, which would allow better tracing. Another would allow New York to do its own background checks, instead of outsourcing the process to the F.B.I.
What would the first do? The gun is recovered. Doing their own backgrounds requires the information to be reported in the first place, and, you can see lawsuits if NY slow walks the checks.
Other measures would institute new requirements for gun dealers, including better record keeping and increased staff training.
Which would do what? The NY Times doesn’t say because there’s no rational reason.
But advocates have questioned whether New York’s existing laws could be better implemented.
Under New York’s so-called red flag law, for example, relatives, school officials and law enforcement can ask a court to remove guns from the home of a person at high risk of harming themselves or others and prevent them from buying new ones — a prohibition that can last as long as a year. But the law was not invoked against the suspect in the Buffalo attack, even after his threat to murder and commit suicide alarmed a school official enough to alert police.
There are plenty of laws. If you do not implement the laws correctly, more laws won’t help. Really, the idea is not to solve anything, because then they can’t bloviate. Politicians rarely want to fix a problem.
Now, perhaps they can talk about all the people that shoot each other in NYC.