Lupica: Take gun control talks beyond assault weapons

Lupica: Take gun control talks beyond assault weapons

Ken Murray/New York Daily News

A police officer is taken to an ambulance after he was shot on the subway at Fort Hamilton Parkway and 62nd St. in Brooklyn. Too often, the response in Washington to Mayor Bloomberg about guns used in incidents like this is that he is some rich guy who's out of touch. No, he's the single most important gun-control advocate we have, and those who can help curtail such crime in big cities ought to listen. 
 

This is how the new year really begins in New York City, not with the ball falling in Times Square at midnight, but with three cops shot in two separate incidents on a cold Thursday evening, after a dozen were shot last year.

This is the reality of guns in the city, even as the terrible headlines out of Newtown, Conn., continue, as the surviving children of Sandy Hook Elementary go back to school â€" even if it is a different school in a different town, for the young lives that will never be the same.

President Obama and all these top politicians always want to have a new conversation about guns, especially big guns with big clips, every time there is another Newtown, or Aurora, Colo., every time an assault weapon ends up in the wrong hands and innocent people die, the way they died in Newtown less than a month ago â€" 20 of the innocents grade-school children this time.

But these same politicians, no matter how well-intentioned, never seem to want to talk about the handguns, so many of them illegal, that keep coming into New York, the ones that keep being used to shoot New York City policemen.

A dozen were hit last year, and now three get hit on the third night of the new year â€" one while off duty in the Bronx, two at the N train station at Fort Hamilton Parkway and 62nd St. in Brooklyn.

So on the third of January, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is first on his way to Jacobi Medical Center to check on the condition of Officer Juan Pichardo, 34 years old, nine years on the job, working out of the 41st Precinct in the Bronx, shot by one of the guys who tried to hold up the car dealership in Bronxdale the cop owns.

Pichardo, a father of three, takes a bullet in the leg at Boston Road near Adee Ave. as he goes after a guy with a gun. Another bad guy with a gun in the city. But Pichardo still manages to help a co-worker hold the guy down, take the gun away. Other cops show up, and later catch up with two other suspects.

The police commissioner is asked if Pichardo is going to be all right, and answers with a terse “Yes,” then he is on his way to Lutheran Medical Center to see about the two cops shot at the N train station.

The shooter, who was riding between the train’s cars, hits one of the cops in the leg. A second cop had the back of his bulletproof vest grazed by a bullet. The two cops make it to Lutheran Medical Center alive.

The shooter is not so lucky.

This is the night of 1/3/13 in New York City, one cop hit at 6:32 in the evening in the Bronx, two more hit in Brooklyn exactly one hour later. It all happens around 13 months after Officer Peter Figoski was shot and killed while on the job, and almost a year from the date when Officer Kevin Brennan somehow survived a gunshot round to the head he suffered in a Brooklyn doorway as he tried to take a gun away from a bad guy.

These are the guns and the shootings that rarely seem to greatly capture the interest of Washington, D.C., the guns and the shootings that Mayor Bloomberg talks about and shouts about constantly.

But too often the response from those in Washington who could actually do something about these guns â€" and not just the kind of assault rifle that Adam Lanza used in Newtown â€" is that Bloomberg is some kind of rich crank, when in fact he has become the single most important advocate for better gun control, in big cities and in the country, that we’ve ever had.

It was not so long ago, when Joe Kemp of this paper wrote such a fine piece on all the cops shot last year in New York, that I was talking to Raymond Kelly about the night he watched doctors take the bullet out of Kevin Brennan’s head in the emergency room in Bellevue Hospital.

“One trip like that to the hospital is too many,” Kelly said.

But he made two more of those trips last night. Three more cops shot. Third night of the year in the city. The ball falls, then more cops do the same.