NEW YORK — New York lawmakers passed measures this week to strengthen the state’s already muscular gun laws, responding to last month’s heartbreaking mass shootings and long-running federal paralysis on firearms.
It was a dramatic split-screen: As Democrats in the evenly split U.S. Senate grasped for modest changes to the nation’s gun laws that would earn rare Republican votes, the ruling Democrats in Albany charged ahead with stringent legislation.
By the end of the year’s legislative session, lawmakers had passed a package of bills that would raise the minimum age to buy semiautomatic rifles, expand the net of people who can flag potentially dangerous New Yorkers under the state’s so-called red flag laws and mandate microstamping technology in pistols.
