New York Attorney General Letitia James is definitely making a name for herself within the Second Amendment community. None of it in a good way, mind you, but she’s definitely doing it.
Her jihad against the National Rifle Association is just one aspect of her personal animosity toward the gun community, to be sure, but it’s far from the only one.
It seems now she’s turning her attention to things like airsoft and BB guns.
New York Attorney General Letitia James today continued her fight to promote gun safety and reform gun regulations by urging the Biden-Harris Administration to increase safety standards for realistic toy firearms.
In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Alexander Hoehn-Saric, chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Attorney General James calls for new, strong, coherent federal regulations mandating distinct visual differences between toy guns, BB/pellet guns, and lethal firearms.
“As families conclude their holiday shopping and some purchase toy guys for their children, the last thing we want is for a Christmas gift to turn into a Christmas nightmare,” said Attorney General James. “When toy guns are indistinguishable from actual firearms, the consequences can, and have been, deadly. We must take action to protect our children and our communities. In my nearly three years as attorney general, I have consistently seen the tragic consequences of split-second decisions when the authenticity of a gun is in question. There should be no opportunity for confusion when individuals’ lives are on the line. We must put people above profit and ensure our police, crime victims, and children can clearly and easily distinguish fake guns from real ones.”
James argues that the current requirements are insufficient.
Now, let’s be clear here. People do use these realistic-looking guns to commit crimes. Some people holding these kinds of guns have also been shot by police.
Yes, these can be outright tragedies, but to some degree, they’re also cases of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” You point a semi-realistic-looking piece of plastic at the police and you are kind of asking to get shot. Same as if you point it at an armed citizen.
For Letitia James, though, that’s not enough. She has to push for something more.
Meanwhile, if she gets her way, she’ll gut an entire industry.
See, airsoft guns look realistic because they need to look realistic. After all, they’re heavily used in military simulation games, or MilSim. These are games where people from across the spectrum of age, gender, and ethnicity gather together to don military equipment and shoot at each other with something that isn’t going to do more than leave a bruise. It’s an extension of playing war as a kid only this way there’s no arguing over whether someone got shot or not.
If James gets her way, these games may well be effectively over without people doing a lot of modifying to their guns.
Of course, as James seems to take issue with people being able to disguise the orange tip on a toy gun already, I’m willing to bet that anything that can be easily modified would be a no-go for her.
Look, tragedies happen. So do people using these toy guns for nefarious purposes. However, the answer to that is to short-circuit the system that leads to people taking up robbing folks as a vocation, not penalizing those who are doing no such thing.
Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?
The problem is that Attorney General Letitia James can’t become Governor or Senator James without impressing the electorate in her state, and that’s all this is really about.
