Capital New York

In New York State, the police have no duty to provide police protection to any particular individual. The Courts in New York have held that "generally, a municipality may not be held liable for the failure to provide police protection because the duty to provide such protection is owed to the public at large, rather than to any particular individual" (Conde v. City of New York, 24 AD3d 595, 596 [2005]; see Cuffy v. City of New York, 69 NY2d 255, 260 [1987]).

As the Chair of the Public Safety Committee of Manhattan Community Board 12. I will be holding a Public Hearing in September 2012 on NYS Senate Bill S1427 & S1863 with an emphasis on self-defense education & firearm training for women.

Bill S1427 PURPOSE: This proposed constitutional amendment would provide within the New York State Constitution for a right of the people to keep and bear arms for traditionally recognized purposes

Bill S1863 PURPOSE: This legislation would remove a gun licensing officer's ability to deny or restrict the issuance of licenses to law abiding citizens who have successfully undergone the state's strict application process and appropriate New York State and Federal Bureau of Investigations fingerprint background check required under law. In addition, this bill will conform New York State law to current ATF requirements regarding background checks for firearms transfers.

September 12, 2012 at 6:30 PM at Isabella, 515 Audubon Avenue New York, NY 10040. If you live in New York State feel free to take a look at the information that I will be presenting as well as sign my on-line petition included at the link below. I hope that you will come out and support me as I support you. Fraternally.

http://cavalierknight.com/documents.html

If I understand the Bill requiring manufacturers of Firearms provide this microstamping ability on their products correctly, it basically will provide a unique ID on the ammunition that would in turn identify the weapon that it was fired from. I assume that the ID would be on the casing of the round. If the the casings are removed from the scene of the shooting how will microstamping help? Also, if the gun is illegal, you are assuming there is a record of this firearm at some point?

I'm gathering that this is another law and process that will only effect the legal gun owner and will result in no measurable difference in apprehending illegal owners and criminals that use illegal firearms to commit crimes. Which statistically is probably 9 out of 10 crimes committed. I certainly understand the GOP resistance to microstamping and the application of common sense. I am making every effort to bring more common sense to Albany and strengthen the position of the GOP by running to for the 12th Senate seat and remove an ineffective Mike Gianaris from his seat.

The people in the 12th Senate District deserve a voice that will be heard in Albany by someone that will speak their words and not advance his own agenda as is the case with the current Senator Gianaris.

www.justcallmetony.com Twitter @tonyfornysnate

Know how and why "Gun control" measures are not passed? It's because millions of Americans own guns and support the very forces that spend money, lobby, campaign, and personally contact their representatives to tell them WE DO NOT WANT ANY MORE GUN LAWS!
The Second amendment is a Constitutional RIGHT paid for in blood, and some wack-job going on a killing spree DOES NOT give you the right or reason to apply prior restraint to my exercising of this fundamental right, not privilege, RIGHT.
It's sad that those people were MURDERED (a capital crime) but what's even sadder is that someone didn't stand up and shoot the son-of-a-bitch dead where he stood.
The lawful gun owners of this Country are NOT going to let the Left leaning, whiny-ass liberals outlaw the very last thing that stands in their way of tyranny. We're sick of "reasonable laws" while those who could care less about obeying the law use illegally obtained guns illegally!
As for "Micro-Stamping" do your homework; it's just a variation of the miserable failure that COBiS was: 40 million dollars, zero crimes solved, and do you know why? All those new guns were bought legally by licensed persons that are very unlikely to use them in commission of a crime. Even IF you stamped every new gun, statistically they were made before the process and/or stolen....oh, yea we identified the gun this case came from, turns out it was stolen...good luck with that lead. what? you won't seriously investigate a theft, but will a shooting?
We're sick of it, and WE ARE NOT going to to turn in our guns or let you pass legislation to stop us from buying all the guns and ammunition we individually decide we want.
BTW: The ASSembly passes every anti-gun initiative that passes through, at least the Senate has sense enough to reject them.

Mr. Kavanaugh should not confuse himself about whether there's popular support for common-sense gun rights (note I said rights) in New York.

Unfortunately, the topic of gun rights and gun control has been politicized to such an extent nationally, with the GOP attempting to bind gun rights to conservatism, and the Democrats attempting to bind gun control to being 'progressive', that useful discourse on it is currently impossible. This is particularly egregious in New York.

One facet of this politicization is that the gun owning and gun rights community has been cartooned as consisting only of gangbangers, rednecks and extremists - if you own guns and believe in the exercise of gun rights, you must be one of those, pick one.

Well, newsflash: parties serve the people and shape their platform to represent a particular constituency. The people do not modify their perceived interests in order to feel membership in a particular party. As a lifelong Democrat who feels that the current irrationally exuberant economic neoliberalism and Taliban-like attempts at coercion on social issues is a particularly rancid episode in the checkered history of the GOP, I also remember why the Founders wrote the second amendment - because the west was just emerging from a time when clown kings and nobles proclaimed that their power derived from God rather than the consent of the governed, and that the weak should be barred from resisting the power of the strong. I own guns, I understand my legal rights in NY with respect to their use, and I enjoy owning and using them, peaceably and legally. And those who would attempt the aforementioned cartooning would be surprised at the economic power present in the law-abiding gun owning populace. Enough said...

There are deeper questions here, such as: will the black community successfully address ongoing violence among its young by removing a particular tool, or does -it- need to provide them a cultural vision which gives them a path to becoming functional human beings rather than wallowing in gangsta trash culture, on the premise that they have no other alternatives. We see the abuse that drug running gangs practice first on their own people, so gangsta culture shouldn't really have much to recommend it. What does it have, and why does the current black community itself not formulate alternative cultural visions to displace it ? As previous generations of that community did similarly when they formulated the vision of civil rights, achievement and pride in valuable culture 50 years ago.

Similarly, the fantasy of comfortable affluent downstate suburbia, that all communities have the wealth which they have, to pay for law enforcement and that some utopian society is possible where the need for self-defence is eliminated, leads downstate representatives to foist nonsense legislation like microstamping on the New York public, when it is designed first to pander to their own constituents. The assault weapons ban is a reference example for this; FBI crime statistics show consistently that assault weapons account for a tiny percentage of gun crime, and similar weapons not meeting scary cosmetic standards for prohibition are just as, or more, destructive.

We are avoiding coming to grips with the facts that 1. genetics will always produce individuals less prone to inhibiting their antisocial behavior, so the need for self-defence will not go away, and 2. many who commit crime are doing so because they are ignorant or economically hopeless. The current tone which the political class does nothing to disrupt, that we can resume the overconsumptive, imbalanced economic lifestyle which has produced the current economic downturn, will only make crime more likely. It's time to be clear about -why- people reach for a gun to commit crime, and start working on those problems, for real. Removing guns will just make knives and clubs more popular, as has occurred in Britain, Australia and Canada following their bans on most gun ownership.

The political class needs to reacquaint itself with the notion that elected office is first public service rather than a career, that solving problems takes hard work, and that you need to be prepared to be voted out of office but nevertheless do what's right while you're there.

As a police officer, firearms instructor, certified armorer, and NRA member, I am one of the many in law enforcement who see bills such as microstamping for what they are - nonsense. There has never been a documented occasion where further restrciting the rights of those who enjoy the Second Amendment responsibly has resulted in public benefit. The converse, however, is rife with examples - CoBIS and its drastic failure to produce a conviction over 11 years and $44 million being one of the largest.

Thank you to the above author for "holding a Public Hearing in September 2012 on NYS Senate Bill S1427 & S1863 with an emphasis on self-defense education & firearm training for women." If members of the public truly want to know what cops think about these bills, ask. Many of my colleagues are NRA members and most, if not all, know that a lawful gun owner is our friend - not an enemy.

Micro-stamping New York ammunition, eh? What? They don't sell ammunition in New Jersey nor Connecticut?

Gun Bans Only Disarm the Law-Abiding

By John C. Eastman and John R. Lott[i]

This week, after the tragic attacks in Colorado and Wisconsin, State Attorney General Kamala D. Harris and State Senate Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) announced a push for more restrictions on guns. They propose to ban detachable magazines on so-called “assault weapons.” Their hope is to limit the number of bullets that can be shot in quick succession.

This might at first glance appear as a very logical solution. But it has already been tried. After January 1990 and again in January 2000, California’s assault weapons ban made it a crime to own assault weapons with detachable magazines.

But there is no evidence that these bans reduced crime. After the 2000 ban, California’s murder rate rose, even while its overall violent crime rate fell. It wasn’t until 2008—after gun manufacturers developed a detachable magazine that complied with the California restriction—that the murder rate fell back below its 2000 level. And no academic study by a criminologist or economist has shown that the restriction had any beneficial impact on crime rates.
Only in government are actions that fail greeted with calls to double-down on those actions. That if the original restriction didn’t work, the solution must be even stricter regulations. And so it goes with gun control.

For ten years, from 1994 to 2004, the federal Assault Weapons Ban prohibited the manufacture of magazines that could hold more than 10 bullets. When it expired, Senator Diane Feinstein was among the prominent gun control politicians warning that there would be an “open season for criminals who want the most dangerous types of military-style assault weapons” and that there would be “deadly consequences on the streets of America."

Well, that didn’t happen. Since the federal ban expired, murder, robbery, and overall violent-crime rates have actually fallen. In 2003, the last full year before the law expired, the U.S. murder rate was 5.7 per 100,000 people. Initial data for 2011 shows that the murder rate has fallen to 4.7 per 100,000 people.

California itself has had a long experience with assault weapons bans. Its first ban went into effect in January 1990, was struck down by the California State Supreme Court in March 1998, and then was put back into effect in January 2000.

With all these changes in the law, academics have had plenty of data from which to assess the impact of the bans. Yet studies published in peer-reviewed journals, whether by criminologists or economists—and even those funded by the Clinton administration— have not found that either state or federal bans reduced violent crime.

Some studies even find negative effects of these laws. The bans cut the number of gun shows by over 20%, thus making it more costly for law-abiding individuals to get guns for self-defense.

Much of Europe has already adopted every gun control law being proposed over the last few weeks and more in the US, but they haven’t prevented multiple-victim public shootings in Europe. In last year’s shooting near Oslo, 69 people were killed and an additional 110 injured. Germany, a country with some of the strictest gun control in the world — it requires not only extensive psychological screening but also a year’s wait to get a gun — has been the site of three of the worst five multiple-victim K-12 public school shootings in the world, all in the past decade. During just the last few years, there are more examples of attacks in countries with strict gun control, like in Austria, Britain, France, Finland and Italy.

Over the last decade, Europe has had as many mass public shootings as the US. The guns used for the attacks in Germany and Norway were obtained illegally. When individuals plan these attacks months or even years in advance, it is virtually impossible to stop them from getting whatever weapons they need.

The one common feature in all these European attacks and virtually all the ones in the US has been that they keep on occurring where guns are banned.

Californians need only look south to Mexico to see whether extremely strict gun control laws are keeping criminals from getting everything from real machine guns, grenades, and rocket launchers. And these aren’t weapons that they are picking up from US gun dealers.

National surveys of police administrators and street officers show they doubt that assault weapons and other gun bans work. It is the same in California. A 1997 survey conducted by the San Diego Police Officers Association found that 82% of its officers opposed an "assault weapons" ban, 82% opposed a limitation on magazine capacity, and 85% supported letting law-abiding private citizens carry concealed handguns.

Everyone wants to keep guns away from criminals. But gun control proponents face a simple problem: bans are obeyed law-abiding individuals, not criminals. Laws that disarm the law-abiding relative to criminals make crime easier to commit.

Politicians may feel better claiming that they are doing something when crime occurs, but, unfortunately, laws that disarm law-abiding citizens can all too often make the problem worse.

[i] Eastman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service, and former Dean, at Chapman University School of Law; Lott is a former chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission and the author of expanded 3rd edition of More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

There will be no "compromise". There will be no "consensus".

The reason there won't be on this issue is that gun owners would be giving up rights, and the opposition would be giving up nothing in return.

Here's a way to test my assertion:

Propose that the "microstamping" regulation would be acceptable as would requiring all private sales to go through a licensed dealer with background checks (just like neighboring Pennsylvania) if New York changed its permitting criterion from "may issue" to "shall issue", remove the "permit to purchase" nonsense, and enact state preemption that would bring New York City under the same law as the rest of the state.

Then you will see how receptive these Democrat charlatans are to "compromise". I would be confident in agreeing to provisions I find abhorrent because I know there is no way the opposition will give up anything, rendering the whole exercise moot.

Wow. Mr. Canard, that was quite a dissertation.

I enjoyed it immensely.

Why is it that the gun control movement ALWAYS uses terms such as "common sense" and "reasonable" to describe their offerings for eliminating the right to own guns when these proposed laws are anything but sensible or reasonable. We have Princess Dianne waving her wish list of prohibitions which literally ban thousands of weapons for no other reason than that they look "evil" or have "evil characteristics", according to this woman. We have others talking about such things as "assault weapons" when they have absolutely no idea of what it is they are talking about. If your intent is to ban something you must first know all there is to know about the thing you wish to ban. We have others showing their extraordinary ignorance, such as Leland Yee and his proposed "assault bullets" ban. What next? A proposal to ban "assault diapers"? Or perhaps to ban "assault baby carriages"? Until someone made up the term there was no such thing as an "assault rifle". Suddenly everything that these rights' haters want banned is called "assault". If one looks at definitions, an "assault rifle" is capable of high rate fully automatic fire, either belt or magazine fed, and is more or less easy for one person (soldier) to carry. Despite what gun controllers say today's modern rifles are not assault weapons. They are not capable of shooting more than one round at a time and are incapable (by design) of being converted into machine guns; "assault" weapons are ALL machine guns of one sort or another. But apart from all of this is the demonstrated fact that gun rights opponents do not want to compromise. We have been hearing people like VP Biden calling for a "consensus" of opinion in order to achieve a reasonable set of goals. Then we see them invite testimony from everyone that shares their view but from very few persons from the civil rights side of the argument. And let us not forget how they neglect to use the information that is available to them from the Justice Department, information that clearly shows how we should be attacking the problem of violence in our country. Instead we have politicians looking to create a panacea to cure our ills. But this cannot happen because there is no panacea to be found here. There are far too many factors causing the violence but one fact stands out clearly: crimes and criminals flow out from very specific areas in our major cities. It is at these targets that we should be throwing the full weight of ALL of our enforcement abilities. Defending against insane criminals murdering our children is almost impossible due to the fact that we cannot readily identify these individuals with our current abilities. The only way to defend against this kind of attack is to have armed guards on-site in sufficient numbers to effectively cover the area they are defending. As long as there is insanity there will always be the possibility of an attack occurring somewhere. Insane people, like criminals, DO NOT (CANNOT?) obey laws. Therefore any law passed to effect these people will have absolutely NO EFFECT upon them! Hear that Dianne? How about you Barack? Or you Chuck? If you want to help, then stop trying to destroy Americans' ability to defend themselves against crime and criminals.