Warga/News
Gov. Andrew Cuomo ushered his gun-control proposal through the state Legislature in a month and a day following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn.
So now New York is the first state to officially change its gun laws in the aftermath of Newtown. So Albany, once viewed as the lounge act of state politics in this country, once again shows you the possibilities of how government can still be on the right side of history.
This all happens a month and a day after the murder of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary, 20 of them children. Happens big and loud because Gov. Cuomo continues to show his constituents and the country that he can bring people from both parties together, and in so doing bring his state to the kind of moment it had on Tuesday night when Cuomo signed into law the kinds of important gun-control measures that the President of the United States â€" for now â€" still only talks about.
The bill came to Cuomo after a vote of 104-43 in the Assembly early last evening. Game, set, match. Cuomo talked about how proud he was to be a New Yorker afterward, and then Joe Lentol out of District 50 in the New York State Assembly, out of Brooklyn, spoke for everybody.
“When the federal government does not do it, the state of New York has to lead the way,†Lentol said.
There is language in there about assault weapons that no civilian needs, about ammunition and about the owners of weapons now banned in New York State having a year to register those weapons in a new database. There will now be background checks on ammunition buyers, and flags will officially go up when somebody, for some jibbering reason, starts to stockpile ammunition. There are provisions to at least try to keep firearms out of the hands of those who are mentally ill, and expansion of laws on the books for judges to mandate treatment for the mentally ill.
You know all of this was good and right in Albany on Tuesday night because it was praised by the mayor of New York City and condemned at almost warp speed by the National Rifle Association, made so hysterical by New York’s new law that you wanted to look around for party hats.
The NRA blamed Cuomo’s presidential ambitions, and once again talked about assaults on the Second Amendment, the big lie of these phony patriots who represent maybe 4 million out of 160 million gun owners in the United States. They continue to tell their members â€" and try to tell the country â€" that no bans on assault weapons will help, that no curb on ammunition will help, continue to act as if we don’t have to change a thing on guns un America. Of course that is the kind of lie that would do Lance Armstrong proud.
But they can’t stop New York from taking the lead on meaningful gun control, New York the city and New York the state. It happens on the same day President Obama receives Vice President Biden’s own recommendations about gun control, as the President talks about the same kind of assault weapons ban and limits on ammunition and background checks, talks about the same “comprehensive package†that became law in Albany around dinnertime on Tuesday night.
The President only wishes that he could somehow get the kind of cooperation that Cuomo has gotten, really from the day he took office, from both parties, from his state’s Senate and from its Assembly. Once again New York State works, on the big things, the way the federal government should work. Joe Lentol had it absolutely right in Albany on Tuesday night.
“You sometimes wonder what the rest of the country really thinks about New York,†Mike Bloomberg was saying at City Hall on Monday afternoon. “But they ought to look at us on guns.â€
No one, certainly not Andrew Cuomo, would suggest that this new law solves all of the country’s gun problems, or even comes close. But the idea that we are supposed to just sit back, that we are not supposed to look for stricter gun control, is not just wrong a month and a day after Newtown, it is shameful and derelict. If somehow this new law keeps one AR-15, the kind of assault rifle Adam Lanza took into Sandy Hook Elementary, out of the wrong hands, it is worth it, at the expense of no one’s freedoms. If Lanza is somehow just carrying a handgun in Newtown that day, how many lives could have been saved?
The rest of the country had to look to New York on guns Tuesday night, had to take another look at the way government works here. Had to see the way Andrew Cuomo took the lead on this, on this night when Cuomo had what the President of the United States wants.
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