Cody Wisniewski, director of Mountain States Legal Foundation’s Center to Keep and Bear Arms, writes at American Greatness:
New York’s carry law effectively bans all public carriage of firearms, limiting the right to a privileged few for whom state agents grant discretionary permits. A system that—shocking to exactly no one—is rife with abuse and corruption.
Previously, opponents of the illusory permitting system—including Mountain States Legal Foundation’s Center to Keep and Bear Arms— filed briefs arguing that New York’s restrictive law is unconstitutional.
That hasn’t stopped a number of cities from supporting New York’s effective ban on self-defense. Those 12 cities (so far) include Chicago; Baltimore; Cincinnati; Columbus, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; San Diego; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and St. Paul, Minnesota.
In perpetuating the false idea that firearms rather than the individuals wielding them are responsible for crime and violence, the cities in support of New York now argue that the “COVID-19 pandemic and protests over police brutality led to a surge of firearm sales and gun violence in 2020.”
And as a result, they claim: “Any reduction in the ability of [the cities] to enact and enforce stringent firearms regulation sets us back, not forward, in our quest to resolve America’s handgun violence crisis.”
Somehow, with a straight face, these cities contend that preventing people from carrying guns for self-defense “will promote public safety.”
