Gun rights

Good thing they have tough gun laws

September 6, 2011 by Don Surber

New York City has the most restrictive gun law in the nation. One needs the permission of government to own even a shotgun. Nathaniel Burney, a criminal defense lawyer in New York said that even after Heller, “gun possession is presumptively illegal here… Except when the weapon is actually in one’s grasp, it must be rendered inoperable. There’s also a presumptive ban on ammunition.” With such restrictions placed on gun ownership, it should be unimaginable and impossible for 46 people to be shot within 48 hours in New York City. And yet that is exactly what happened this weekend.

From the New York Post on Monday: “Gunfire erupted today near the massive West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn — not far from where Mayor Bloomberg was marching — as the entire city reeled from a epidemic of shootings over the past two days. By noon today, a total of 46 people had been shot in the city since Saturday morning, authorities said… 25 people had been shot as of 6 a.m. Sunday — including three kids at a house party-turned-shooting gallery in The Bronx early Sunday.”

Mayor Mike Bloomberg was so upset that he interrupted his crusade against salt to tell reporters: “We just cannot continue to have these guns in the hands of kids who don’t understand the value of human life.”

Mayor Bloomberg also said there are “too many guns on the streets of this city.”

But how can this be? New York City has the toughest gun laws in the land.

From our criminal defense lawyer, Nathaniel Burney:

New York’s law has things exactly backwards. Instead of gun possession being presumptively lawful, it is presumptively a crime punishable by a year in jail. You can’t make a fundamental right presumptively unlawful, and only then carve out exceptions where it’s okay. You can only carve out exceptions for the rare occasion when exercising that right would be unlawful.

So the presumptive ban is unconstitutional. The requirement that even a duly licensed handgun be rendered inoperable is equally unconstitutional, as it undermines the very right being protected. The Heller decision affirmed, among other things, the Parker case which struck down a similar law. Making it impossible to use your gun for the lawful purpose of self defense — that sort of defeats the purpose.

New York’s licensing burden is also unconstitutional, for a lot of reasons. The fees, especially here in town, are the highest in the nation. It costs something like $440 just to apply here in N.Y.C., and there’s no reason to expect your application would even be granted. The purpose and effect of these fees is to dissuade people from applying in the first place. It’s like the poll taxes of a bygone era, which just like gun control laws originated in the racist attempts to limit the freedoms of African-American citizens after the Civil War. (Oh yeah, we found a long line of cases saying just that, going back to 1872.) The fees’ purpose and effect is an unconstitutional ban on the right to bear arms.

The byzantine procedures one must follow in order to get a license are just another burden on the right. That, and the bureaucracy’s absolute discretion to grant, deny or revoke a license, are even more of an unconstitutional infringement of the right.

And as with all things that are unconstitutional, this ban on guns is ineffective.

That is because the founding fathers were wiser than Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, Abraham Beame, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg and all those other mayors, councilmen and horse’s asses who allowed this dreadful law to remain on the books. The way to battle crime is to go after the criminals and not our rights.