When Eric Adams was running for mayor of New York last year, he actually generated some excitement among conservatives in the city, who rightfully saw him as far more moderate than uber-lefty Bill de Blasio. But a “moderate” Democrat in New York City is still going to end up taking a lot of positions that are decidedly un-conservative, and Adams has already proven himself to be no better than de Blasio or Michael Bloomberg when it comes to the Second Amendment rights of New Yorkers.
To the best of my knowledge, however, this is the first time that Adams has stood side-by-side with an anti-gun group since his election. On Wednesday Adams joined Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety in demanding the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives revoke the firearms license of Nevada company Polymer 80, which (among other things) produces the “Buy, Build, Shoot” kits that Joe Biden is trying to ban via an ATF rule change.
In their letter, Adams and Everytown said they were “deeply concerned” that the company continues to keep its federal license “despite clear evidence of numerous willful violations” of the law.
The New York City Police Department linked a shooting last month in the Bronx that left a 16-year-old girl dead and two other teens injured to a ghost gun assembled from a Polymer80 kit, the city said.
Allowing it to keep the license “would also send a terrible message to bad actors in this industry and would be wholly inconsistent with the administration’s crackdown on ghost gun sellers and its ‘zero tolerance’ approach to wayward gun manufacturers and sellers,” the letter said.
The problem for Adams and Everytown is that Polymer 80 is already on the ATF’s radar, and apparently the agency has found no reason to try to revoke its license.. or at least not one that will stand up in court. The agency conducted a search of the company’s premises in late 2020, but has taken no official action against the firm or any of its employees in the months since. Maybe that will change now that Biden has a new yes man overseeing the agency while his administration attempts to rally support for the confirmation of anti-gun politician Steve Dettelbach as the ATF’s permanent director, but so far there’s been no public announcement on the part of the ATF.
For Adams, the decision to join forces with Everytown not only allows him to once again prove his anti-gun bona fides, but to also distract from the fact that major crimes are becoming more common since he took office vowing to make the city a safer place. By focusing on “ghost guns”, however, Adams is ignoring the fact that unserialized firearms are only a small fraction of the guns being confiscated by the NYPD.
The NYPD said thus far this year, it has taken about 200 ghost guns off the street, compared with 148 for the entire year in 2020. The weapons are a fraction of roughly 2,600 illegal firearms recovered in New York City this year.
Polymer80 has been targeted by other elected officials and law enforcement departments around the U.S., including the ATF, and Everytown.
Everytown last year joined the city of Los Angeles to sue Polymer80 for allegedly creating a public nuisance and violating the state’s business code. Two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies badly wounded in an ambush shooting sued the company in August for making parts of a ghost gun used in the attack and the attorney general of Washington, D.C., has filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming it violated D.C. gun laws.
I realize I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but there is no way that Adams is going to make New York City a safer place by curtailing the supply of firearms; a Sisyphean task in a day and age where violent criminals can obtain guns made from scratch, stolen, or acquired via a straw purchase. The only way to successfully curb violence in New York City is by reducing the demand for firearms among violent criminals, and the best way to do that is to ensure that there are consequences for using a gun in the commission of a violent crime. Adams would be better off keeping up his calls for bail reform and beefing up the number of detectives in the NYPD tasked with solving murders and non-fatal shootings, but I guess he feels it’s more important to virtue signal his support for gun control instead.
