Peter Vallone is clearly worried about reciprocity:
“The City Council’s Public Safety Committee, and then the full council, are set to vote today to denounce a bill just passed by the US House of Representatives that would force every state to honor gun-carry permits issued by other states. The House is indeed off-base here — but New York City still needs to get its act together …”
He got that last part right. NYC and NYS need to get their act together. All the Clown Council’s actions are going to do is demonstrate how out of touch from reality they are. It will not have any effect in Congress.
“… Meredith Graves has become the poster child for the House bill …”
Yes.
“… Imagine an upstanding citizen who’s gone through the background check etc. to get a carry permit in another state and is flying with the gun safely checked in his luggage — until the plane is forced to land at JFK because of mechanical problems, obliging the traveler to spend the night here. He asks where to check his weapon and is immediately arrested … That’s not a nightmare, it’s the existing law in New York state. Reform is needed, now …”
What about the upstanding local citizen who can pass any background check, but gets thumbs down from the NYPD because he isn’t politically connected? Why should they be treated any differently than tourists? Vallone doesn’t strike me as stupid. He must know where this is going.
“… Don’t get me wrong: I’ve written and helped pass many strict gun-control laws to prevent the flow of illegal weapons into New York, and prevent their possession here …”
And they have failed miserably in preventing violent thugs from getting whatever they want.
“… But legal guns, with permits granted here or elsewhere, are not the ones being used to commit crimes, and they aren’t the problem our strict gun laws were enacted to combat …”
Really? Is he going to back that statement up by calling for abolishing the Sullivan Act?
“… What Albany needs to do (and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has indicated a willingness to consider) is to carve out a very narrowly tailored exception in the law to cover people who have gone through background checks and have carry permits from other states who don’t intentionally violate our gun laws. But Albany must not use this valid need for reform to completely gut our tough laws, as lawmakers did with the Rockefeller Drug laws …”
No, he’s not.
“… Yet we still need to fix our gun laws, both for the sake of fairness and to head off that bill in Washington. While our carry laws are too strict (only a few thousand people in New York City have carry permits), New York should set its own standards … with cases like Meredith Graves’, we’re giving the rest of the country ammunition to force passage of the House bill. If that happens, we’ll have truly shot ourselves in the foot.”
At least he’s honest enough to admit his real intentions, blocking H.R. 822.