Using the July mass shooting in Manhattan which claimed four lives, two perennial anti-gun New York congressmen have introduced a resolution calling for a ban on so-called “assault weapons” and enactment of other gun controls.
Congressmen Jerrold Nadler, in whose district the shooting occurred, and Dan Goldman—both Democrats—say the killer “exploited weak gun laws in Nevada to purchase a military-style semi-automatic weapon before transporting it to New York City, where such weapons are illegal to buy or possess.”
But Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, already offered a far different perspective about gun control laws in general, and New York’s laws, specifically, in the aftermath of the tragic shooting, which occurred July 28.
“The murderer drove clear across the country from his home in Nevada to commit a horrible crime that New York anti-gunners said their laws would prevent,” Gottlieb observed. “In the process, he violated laws in New York which were supposed to prevent this sort of outrage, and likewise when he drove through neighboring New Jersey. Did their existing gun laws stop him? They didn’t even slow him down.”
Gottlieb noted at the time that gun laws in New York City’s central business district—where local and state law makes it virtually impossible to legally carry a defensive firearm—proved that New York’s policies are literally “dead wrong.”
“It is time to separate reality from the fantasy world in which gun control proponents seem to thrive,” he said at the time. “They seem to imagine that adding more restrictions on the rights of lawful gun owners will somehow prevent criminals and crazy people from committing violent crimes, and that is a dangerously flawed presumption.”
All of this was apparently lost on Nadler and Goldman, whose 531-word resolution declares their restrictive gun law proposals are “commonsense.”
“Without uniform federal legislation, our nation’s dangerous patchwork of state gun safety laws means that Americans are only as safe as the weakest state law, not the strongest,” Goldman said in a prepared statement.
“I implore my colleagues to carry out our responsibility and do everything we can to put an end to these preventable tragedies by supporting federal legislation that requires universal background checks, bans weapons of war, and prohibits gun ownership for those who are an extreme risk,” Nadler added.
But back in July, Gottlieb may have been thinking ahead when he summed it up: “People now proposing more restrictions on law-abiding citizens, apparently learned nothing from Michigan’s Walmart knife attack, which was stopped by a legally-armed private citizen. The difference between good people with guns and politicians who dislike guns is that the politicians exploit tragedies while armed citizens want to prevent tragedies.”
