Though there are more than enough guns and willing trigger-pullers already here to do plenty of damage for a long time, we can’t argue with Joe Biden that easy access to firearms via the Iron Pipeline is fueling death and destruction on New York streets, so we commend his promise to ramp up the feds’ cooperation with cities and states to combat gun trafficking.
We welcome the federal funding he wants to send the way of New York and other cities, asking Congress for a $300 million boost in a grant program to hire cops and $200 million more for gun violence prevention programs. We also welcome a Justice Department crackdown on ghost guns.
We applaud his commitment to trying to get new gun safety laws through Congress — one he’ll have to honor with action. It’s crowd-pleasing to condemn the obscene magazine with 40 extra bullets that Lashawn McNeil used to kill Detectives Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora, which became federally legal in 2004 when Republicans let the assault weapons ban expire. It is hard to get a new ban or an end to outrageous liability protections for gun makers or universal background checks through even a narrowly Democratic Congress, where not enough lawmakers have an appetite for new firearm laws.
Last, we salute the moral support the leader of the Democratic Party and the nation gave Mayor Eric Adams, whose anti-gun-violence strategies have been cheaply derided as racially discriminatory because they dare call on cops to interdict more illegal weapons in neighborhoods where they’re rampant. Truth be told, the ex-cop mayor’s moral support for the president probably proved more valuable, as it helps him separate himself from those on the far-left fringes who offer little to combat a nationwide spike in murders other than fresh calls to cuff the cops. Biden’s never been a “defund the police” type, but dishonest Republicans have leaped at the opportunity to create that impression.
It’s very nice to have a friend in the highest place in Washington, in stark contrast to 2017-2020, when a guy from Queens routinely waged policy war against his hometown — a war that’s ongoing, as three Supreme Court justices he nominated stand poised to help strike down state gun laws and potentially allow concealed carry of firearms anywhere in America. That would be a bloodshed-unleashing disaster of historic proportions.
But a political alliance means little if it doesn’t deliver tangible changes in Brownsville and Bed-Stuy and Harlem, in the South Bronx and Midtown and Astoria, in Jamaica and on Coney Island, and underground. Until fewer people fear for their safety and their lives, it’s all words.
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