Cuomo Gun Law

Direct from Albany we have the latest winner in the category of grandstanding, self-serving politicians: the ineffectual, union pandering, rubber faced, socialist, Andrew Cuomo.  Does anyone out there with a functioning cerebral cortex think that his passage of “the toughest gun law in the country” in a closed door, middle of the night, Obama-esque end-around has anything to do with preventing gun violence?  The short answer: No.  This has everything to do with political posturing and appealing to his liberal base to set himself up for a run at the presidency in 2016.  With a swift stroke of his opportunistic pen, he has managed to stomp on the Second Amendment and turn legal, law-abiding, tax paying gun owners throughout the once great State of New York into criminals.  Bravo, I can hear Bloomberg high fiving his armed security detail.  I can also imagine the fury in Obama’s camp who was beaten to the political punch and whose thunder was stolen by a two-bit politician attempting to become the socialist heir apparent. His speech was nothing more than a stump speech, shrill and wild-eyed with all the charm of Howard Dean’s notorious war cry. He sounded more like a union thug or a mob boss than a presidential contender in a performance that will not play well with moderate republicans or independents. All in all, a pitiful display of political opportunism.

Mr. Cuomo, how exactly is it that the will of your downstate Manhattan elites should be imposed on a dairy farmer in Rome?  How is it that the highly politicized, city-warped views of a bunch of Mercedes driving, Starbucks sipping, yuppies with their Italian suits, man purses and season tickets to Broadway shows have anything to do with the daily reality of a pick-up driving, deer-hunting farmer freezing his butt off in a pair of Carharts in upstate New York whose concerns are getting in two milking cycles a day and keeping the coyote and woodchuck population in check?  New York State is a big, diverse place and this wrong-headed bill is like having someone in northern New Jersey pretending to know and influence the life of someone in rural Montana. You can’t paint all of New York with one big liberal brush and Cuomo’s comment that New York is a “progressive state” was verification that as far as New York state legislators are concerned, upstate is just an inconvenience.  New York City, Westchester County and Long Island are where the votes are and to hell with the rest of you.  Thank you governor for clarification, we suspected as much.  Rural America take note.

Tougher gun laws are not necessarily smart gun laws.  Once again, all the laws on the books are worthless if they are not enforced or if they are not adhered to by the criminal element.  It is essentially like making crime illegal.  Duh.  The insistence by the leftists on demonizing guns based on appearance is preposterous.  Cuomo’s expansion of the definition of an assault weapon to a gun with only one “military style” feature makes him look like an idiot.  Calling a semi-automatic rifle an assault weapon because it has a bayonet lug is like calling a Plymouth Neon a race car because it has a spoiler.  And the restriction of magazines to 7 rounds with the caveat that you can have a ten round magazine but are not allowed to load it with more than seven rounds is ludicrous.  Are we going to start a new division of magazine police?  And while on the subject of magazines:  this nonsense about magazine restriction to seven but you can have a ten round magazine but only load it to seven and only have two total and all magazines greater than 10 are instantly illegal and have to be disposed of within a year is like reading the NFL rules on blocking.  Only this, only there, and not always, but sometimes.  It is nothing more than a hilarious inconvenience for the law abiding and a laugh riot for the criminal element who I’m sure are just peeing themselves over the legal contortions, contortions that they have no intention of following anyway. It is an amazing embarrassment that the M-1 Garand, a seventy-year-old rifle credited by General Patton as the greatest battle implement ever designed, the rifle that won World War Two, a twelve pound, wooden stocked, tank of a firearm now has the dubious distinction of being a registered NYS assault weapon, based on a semi-automatic action and a bayonet lug.  And all this nonsense, this political grandstanding for a topic that, despite the media’s best attempts to keep it in the public eye, to report even the errant use of a slingshot in Arkansas, remains at a level of importance ranking of 4% in the public’s list of concerns.  It’s the economy, stupid.

With all these designations and definitions also comes registration, the natural precursor to confiscation.  Of course confiscation is our government’s goal.  Why else would we be spending so much time and resources on registering a group of firearms that are used in less than 1% of all crimes?  Senator Dianne Feinstein, she of the left coast, actually suggested that registration is necessary to track firearms to their owners when they are found at the scene of a crime, thus linking the gun to the criminal?  Seriously? Criminals are not so stupid as to leave valuable tools of the trade at the scene of the crime, and they are only found when the criminal is either dead or otherwise incapacitated at the scene, thereby negating the necessity of tracking the gun to the owner. Furthermore, it is more likely that the perpetrator did not conveniently choose to register his weapon, obtained it through illegal trafficking, or simply stole it to avoid those pesky background checks. Even the socialist leaning Canadians, notorious gun haters in Ms. Feinstein’s class, eliminated their long gun registry because it was found to be costly and ineffectual. Kind of like Congress.  But why would we expect Governor Cuomo to consider statistics or taxpayers in this stump stunt?  New York only recently eliminated a ballistic identification program (COBIS) that established yet another branch of the State Police to catalog and record the markings on cartridges, markings made when ejected from a semi-automatic firearm.  Never mind that the technology was unproven and found to be unreliable (markings on casings change as the extractor in the gun wears or if the parts are replaced). After seven years of operation at a cost of 4 million taxpayer dollars per year, COBIS had failed to solve a single crime.  Next up on the liberal radar is ballistic identification through microstamping, a technology that can be readily defeated with a nail file.  I wonder how much we will spend on that before it too is proven worthless. 

In a related moment of hysterical hypocrisy last week, Obama actually extended secret service protection to former presidents and first ladies for the remainder of their lives while simultaneously seeking to disarm law abiding Americans.  On this issue the NRA has it exactly right:  why is it that our politicians enjoy a life of security surrounded by armed bodyguards but treat the rest of us like serfs?  The NRA pointed to this inconsistency in a television spot where it was asked why Obama’s children have armed security at their school, yet that is not seen as a viable option for the rest of us.  The White House response was quick and predictable: how dare you use Obama’s children as an example, calling the spot “repugnant and cowardly”.  The next day, however, Obama revealed his gun control agenda surrounded by children who wrote letters to the president expressing their concerns about gun violence.  You just can’t make this stuff up.  I’m unsure which is more amusing, the glaring hypocrisy or the suggestion that Obama takes his policy cues from pre-pubescent school children.  As I opined before, why is it that we value our celebrities, our politicians, and even our money so highly that we surround them with armed guards, yet when the NRA suggests the same level of protection for our children, they are vilified in the press? From the democrat party that preaches equality, praises redistribution, and lavishes the poor with entitlements why do we see such hypocrisy in not allowing us, the people, the same level of security that they enjoy?  Fend for yourselves they seem to be saying.  Let them eat cake. They don’t even have to suffer through Obamacare.

And speaking of healthcare, how exactly are we going to monitor our mental health professionals?  Every time a bipolar patient hiccups, are they expected to make a call or file a report?  How exactly does all this meld seamlessly with a patient’s right to privacy, physician confidentiality and HIPAA?  And who exactly polices the mental health professional?  If one of their patients goes off the reservation, are they to be held responsible for not reporting a potentially unstable individual as a danger to society? And how is all this going to be enforced anyway?  Are we moving to the next level in a violation of out rights?  Are we going to conduct home inspections?  Arbitrarily conduct raids on random gun owners from the state data base?  Is it time to hack another chunk out of the Constitution, you know that inconvenient part about illegal search and seizure?  This is how freedom is lost.  With registration will come confiscation.  It is how England did it, how Australia did it and how every authoritarian regime in history has done it including Stalin’s.  So line up and register your weapons to the applause of the media and the left.  And take one step closer to servitude.  After all, when we finally rebel, the government can be assured that you will only have seven rounds in your magazine.

So in summary, I can only hope that Mr. Cuomo’s partisan stump speech will irreparably damage his presidential aspirations by failing to resonate with independents and centrist democrats, whilst completely alienating moderate republicans.  There is a fine line between a passionate speech and just being nuts.  Ten “bullets” may indeed be more ammunition than you “need to hunt deer”, it may be just about right for coyotes, crows and woodchucks, but it is most certainly less than you need when an oppressive, tyrannical government comes calling to quell a rebellion.  And that, my dear Mr. Cuomo, is the true intent of the Second Amendment.