New York Enacts New Gun Legislation
New York has become the first state to legislate new gun laws since the school massacre in Newtown, Conn. The new law focuses on firearms and mental health issues, and broaden the definition of an assault weapon. The new legislation strengthens New York’s existing laws on the assault weapons ban, and limit the number of bullets allowed in magazines, and also includes a requirement to report potentially harmful behavior.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is a gun owner, said, “The December 14 Newtown tragedy encouraged lawmakers’ call to action.” He called it a “common sense measure.” Both the GOP-controlled Senate and Democratic Assembly overwhelmingly approved the measures, considered America’s toughest gun laws, just one week after Cuomo spelled out the proposals in his State of the State address.
The new legislation drew disappointment from the nation’s largest gun lobby over the speed with which the bill was passed in the new legislative session.
The National Rifle Association accused Cuomo and other state lawmakers of orchestrating “a secretive end-run around the democratic process.” No-one from the NRA was able to explain how public debate followed by open votes in two legislative chambers and a subsequent bill signed publicly by an elected governor bypassed the democratic process.
The NRA, with a few million members, has long held undue influence in Washington through a combination of campaign finance contributions and intensive lobbying of lawmakers. Though its track record for unseating those it opposes is poor (it lost 99 percent of the major races it funded in the 2012 election cycle), the organization is generally perceived as a threat to candidates it disagrees with.
After attending the White House task force meetings on January 10 with Vice President Biden, the NRA released this statement: “We attended today’s White House meeting to discuss how to keep our children safe and were prepared to have a meaningful conversation about school safety, mental health issues, the marketing of violence to our kids and the collapse of federal prosecutions of violent criminals. We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe, and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment.”
Historically, the NRA has opposed all restrictions on gun ownership, types of ammunition (including armor-piercing “cop-killer” bullets), and sizes of magazines, calling instead for “tougher enforcement” of existing laws. When the Obama administration called for tougher enforcement of existing laws, however, the NRA came out in opposition to those measures as well.
