New York Newspaper Rips The State’s Gun Control Law
An editorial in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise ripped the New York SAFE Act, suggesting that backers of the gun control measure “didn’t realize the length to which those who want to do harm will go to do so, or maybe the SAFE Act was always more symbolic than pragmatic.”
The newspaper said that the SAFE Act, passed almost four years ago, is officially known as the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013. Among Empire State gun owners, however, it is viewed with contempt. The editorial discussed a report released by state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that asserted 70 percent of the guns used in crimes in the state came from other states.
“However,” the editorial observed, “the report’s data shows that the percentage of crime guns from out of state remained remarkably even before and after New York’s SAFE Act was passed in 2013. From 2010 to 2015, it only fluctuated between 73 and 75 percent. The number of recovered crime guns went down, along with the violent crime rate throughout the Northeast, but the out-of-state percentage stayed the same.”
But the newspaper identified the real losers in New York: “Three years after its passage, the gun-related freedoms of people who have done nothing wrong have been restricted while people who have no business owning a gun find ways to get one.”
This result of gun control is not unique to New York. Restrictive gun laws do not appear to have kept firearms out of the wrong hands. Chicago is a prime example, where more than 700 people had been slain by mid-November, and there was no sign of a slowdown for the holiday season.
Out in Washington State, where well-financed anti-gunners pushed through a $10 million-plus “universal background check” initiative two years ago, murders have continued. This includes the September Cascade Mall shooting of five people by a teen who stole the murder weapon from his step-father after being discouraged in an attempt to buy a gun at a local gun shop.
In another case earlier this year in Mukilteo, a community north of Seattle, a teen did legally purchase a semi-auto rifle and use it to kill three other teens and wound a fourth. The suspect in that case passed a background check.
Coincidentally, research published recently in an issue of the JAMA Internal Medicine suggested that gun control laws requiring background checks—even for temporary transfers as required under the Washington State law and the new one passed Nov. 8 in Nevada—might have a bad downside. They interfere with suicide prevention.
That suggestion got the attention of Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation. Earlier this year, he championed legislation aimed at suicide prevention in Washington, where two years ago, he battled passage of Initiative 594, the “universal background check” measure. Those checks so far do not appear to have prevented a single crime, and only one person has so far been charged with violating the law for allegedly supplying a firearm that may have been used in a homicide.
At the time he fought I-594, Gottlieb insisted that “the Devil is in the details,” but those concerns were roundly dismissed by anti-gunners. Now, however, the the medical journal article suggests he had a point.
Meanwhile, back in New York, the newspaper editorial acknowledged, “Mr. Schneiderman is right that a piecemeal, state-by-state approach to gun laws is doomed to fail. Any changes should be federal in nature.
“But we caution our federal representatives about using Mr. Schneiderman’s report to justify further infringements on legal gun owners without being sure new laws will actually keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” the newspaper concluded.
