A shooting early Sunday morning at a Brooklyn nightclub left three people dead and nine others wounded, and so far the NYPD has no one in custody.
While the shooting is just the latest high-profile failure of New York's draconian gun laws in preventing violent crime, officials were quick to downplay the incident as a rarity in the Big Apple.
“I can easily stand here and tell you that we have driven down crime, that we have removed over 2,000 illegal guns off our street,” a grim-faced Mayor Eric Adams told reporters during a briefing on Sunday’s violence and mentioning the other recent mass shooting.
“I can give you those numbers and those stats. But that does not comfort those who are victims of gun violence,” he said.
No, especially when it's still far easier to get a gun illegally than it is to lawfully bear arms in the Big Apple. Adams is quick to tout the number of guns that have been seized by the NYPD, but good luck getting him or any other official to say how many concealed carry permits the department has issued this year.
Cops responded to 911 calls of a shooting inside the Taste of the City Lounge at 903 Franklin Ave. in Crown Heights — less than a half mile from the historic Brooklyn Museum — just before 3:30 a.m., NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at the press conference.
The club was packed when the bullets flew, the commish said — with detectives later recovering 42 shell casings from multiple .9mm and .45-cabliber weapons.
The three people killed were all men — ages 27, 35 and 19, cops said. The teen was pronounced dead at the scene, while the other two died at the hospital, Tisch said.
Some of those shot in the “tragic, senseless act of violence” were innocent victims, the top cop said.
“Yes, there had to have been innocent victims here,” she said.
Would the presence of any legally armed citizen have stopped this shooting? Maybe not, but neither did any of New York's restrictive gun laws. At this point we have no idea how many perpetrators may have been involved in the shooting, but I'd be shocked if any of them possess a New York City carry permit, and I doubt they went through a background check before getting the ammunition for their guns, as is also required under state law.
Tisch made sure to tout the fact that the NYPD has recorded the "lowest number of shooting incidents and shooting victims seven months into the year... seen on record in the city of New York,” calling the mass shooting an "anomaly" and a "terrible thing."
It's true that events like this are rare, but that's also the case in cities like Dallas, New Orleans, and Atlanta; all of which are located in constitutional carry states. But according to the anti-gunners, incidents like the one in Brooklyn early Sunday morning aren't supposed to happen at all given the wide variety of gun control measures in place.
Instead, as I mentioned earlier, it's much easier to illegally get ahold of a gun in New York than to possess one legally. The cretins who committed this crime didn't bother to wait for months on end to obtain a carry permit. They didn't provide the NYPD with character references or have to shell out hundreds of dollars in training costs and application fees. They just got a gun on the black market, and so long as they had the cash on hand they needed, they were good to go.
New York's gun laws are doing a much better job of leaving good people defenseless than disarming violent criminals, even with the thousands of firearms the NYPD has seized this year. If Adams wants to brag about getting guns "off the street," so be it. He should still be ashamed for aiding and abetting the New York Police Department in slow-walking carry permits... as well as his embrace of "gun-free zones" and every other law that prevents responsible New Yorkers from exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Editor’s Note: As bad as Eric Adams has been for gun owners, things are going to be even worse if Zohran Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo becomes the next mayor of New York City.
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