New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is getting tough on guns and that pesky Second Amendment.
What else is a man supposed to do when he's charged with repeated sexual harassment and corruption during the pandemic that led to thousands of deaths?
As the Democrat-led NY Assembly investigates Cuomo in an impeachment probe, the governor has apparently decided to distract from all the negative press by using everyone's favorite punching bag: firearms. He's declared a "state of emergency."
The order is the first such state of emergency declared over gun violence in the United States, but you can bet it won't be the last. Cuomo us using the 'Rona as a template, saying it's a matter of "public health."
Welcome to the perpetual crisis, y'all!
"This new strategy treats gun violence as a public health crisis, using short-term solutions to manage the immediate gun violence crisis and reduce the shooting rate, as well as long-term solutions that focus on community-based intervention and prevention strategies to break the cycle of violence," Gov. Cuomo's office said in a statement. "The disaster emergency allows the State to expedite money and resources to communities so they can begin targeting gun violence immediately."
There's also the use of the terms "systemic injustice" and "building back better" that are being invoked as a way to chip away at the Second Amendment:
"We're building New York back better than ever before, but part of rebuilding is addressing the systemic injustices that were exposed by COVID. If you look at the recent numbers, more people are now dying from gun violence and crime than COVID – this is a national problem but someone has to step up and address this problem because our future depends on it."
Gun violence is indeed a problem. There were 26 people shot in NYC last weekend, 14 in Buffalo, and 5 in Syracuse. That's nowhere near the 88 people shot in the Illinois dystopia of Chiraq, but it's not good to say the least.
Last year, NYC alone had a surge in violent crime, including a much higher murder total in 2020 over the previous year.
The question remains: How did New York get here?
The New York Post had some thoughts on that.
The Post notes that Cuomo has spent the last three years hampering the police and empowering criminals by spouting off leftist screeds on police violence, equity, reparations, and the like.
...There's not a word in his long release about fixing the disastrous bail reforms that he so proudly signed onto — not even the one that guaranteed that nobody would see jail time "just" because he got caught with an illegal gun.
Nor about undoing his "Say Their Name" package of restrictions on cops, which encourage police all across New York to look the other way rather than act when they see suspicious activity, lest the officer's career be ruined by good-faith attempts to proactively protect the public.
Cuomo's plan will tell State Police to focus on guns coming into the state, but the Post notes that most violence is carried out by firearms that are a decade old. Taking a play out of Kamala Harris's playbook, he also says he wants to get to the "root causes" of gun violence.
Such meaningless posturing is a great way to talk about the "border" without ever actually going to the "border."
And that's not all:
His $138.7 million for "intervention and prevention" means more "violence interrupters" and social workers, not more or even better policing.
Heck, his new state Office of Gun Violence Prevention will report to the state Department of Health — the very agency that so bungled the pandemic's onset, to deadly effect for thousands of elderly nursing-home residents.
Anyway, it's plainly absurd to think that micromanaging policing from Albany will improve results. All the gov's orders to local police departments — from his new demand that they share data on shootings to his mandate last year that they all come up with plans for de-policing reforms to appease Defund protesters — are just loud posturing.
Just in case you thought that was the end of the Post's absolute takedown of America's worst governor, they delivered one final uppercut that sent him backpedaling over the ropes and face-first out of the ring:
New York needs its cops getting guns off the streets, and its prosecutors and judges jailing those caught with illegal firearms. But the politicians have spent the last several years making that work near-impossible: That's the "root cause" of the crime spike Cuomo pretends he's addressing, and his own fingerprints are all over it.
The people seemed to agree with the Post:
