Charles Curley wrote (okay, submitted): > >Recent months have seen a former Marine from Indiana, a Tea Party >activist from California and a nurse from Tennessee all arrested and >charged in New York City for possession of firearms they had legal >permits to carry back home. All were "nabbed" when they naively sought >to check the weapon with security. > >These innocents fell afoul of the nation's toughest gun laws. But few >New Yorkers know how those laws came to be. > .......snip.........
> >http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_strange_birth_of_ny_gun_laws_QJmHRpczvWipydklC80HYM > It is refreshing to see a spade called a spade - Tim Sullivan was, indeed, one of the Tammany toughs who literally ran NYC with an iron fist back in the day. However, I think that by quoting Mr. Sullivan the article is slightly disingenuos: >The Tammany Tiger needed to rein in the gangs without completely crippling >them. Enter Big Tim with the perfect solution: >Ostensibly disarm the gangs — >and ordinary citizens, too — while still keeping them on the streets. >In fact, he gave the game away during the debate on the bill, which flew >through Albany: “I want to make it so the young thugs >in my district will get >three years for carrying dangerous weapons instead of getting a sentence in >the electric chair a year >from now.” Yes, the law was aimed at street gangs and, if you've ever seen the movie "The Gangs of New York" you know who the Five Pointers were. But just as Southern gun restrictions were aimed at minorities so were these New York restrictions and despite his Irish heritage you can do the research to discover that the Sullivan Act is aimed (no pun intended) at the Irish, Jewish, and Italian minorities then extant in NYC. The gangs were the helpful catalyst. ***GRJ*** PS: The current New York County (Manhattan) District Attorney enforces these laws with a vengeance. He has stretched the definition of illegal weapons/illegal knives to include every kind of typical tactical knife you can think of. The Beretta Gallery on Madison Avenue and E. 63rd Street displays about 20% of the knives that the Beretta Gallery at the Highland Park Village in Dallas displays (Mockingbird at Preston if you're down there). No lockbacks, especially those with buttons to assist with opening the blade, never mind spring assists. To be sure, many folks carry them, you can see them in the pockets of local workmen on the street here and there, but any time a NYC policemen takes it upon himself to arrest someone carrying such a "weapon" he has the backing of the DA's office. It's a crazy atmosphere if you're used to carrying similar items on a daily basis and I daresay most of us do that. (I do not know if the DA's counterparts in the other 4 NY counties are as bad but it would not surprise me much to find out that they are.) If the NYC Beretta Gallery actually has handguns they are nowhere to be seen. Absent a permit, don't even breathe the word handgun. I find it quite intolerable, personally, but since I'm just a visitor I get over it as soon as I get home. _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Firearmsregprof@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
