New York's new law leads to "mass confusion"

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and her fellow lawmakers pushed through the new concealed carry law as fast as they could because they knew the Bruen decision would go against them. They pushed it through using some legislative tricks that allowed them to pass the law faster than they normally would have been able to.

Advertisement

Which is what politicians do.

However, that rush job is creating all kinds of problems.

On the first day the state’s new gun laws went into effect Thursday, New Yorkers were delivered a set of mixed messages on what to expect moving forward.

First, a federal judge in Syracuse declined to issue an injunction stopping the new statutes from taking effect in a ruling in which he also detailed the numerous ways in which he said the law is “unconstitutional.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul held a news conference in Manhattan with New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week touting the new gun laws and pledging to “continue leading the way forward and implementing common sense gun safety legislation” that she said is intended to protect New Yorkers from gun violence. New signs quickly went up signaling gun-free zones everywhere from the state Capitol to Times Square.

Amid those conflicting elements law enforcement officials and county clerks are juggling relatively high levels of applications for concealed carry gun permits, often from citizens who are unsure of all of the new details and whether their requests will be granted.

“It’s just mass confusion,” Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple said.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that a number of sheriffs intended to use Thursday as a window of sorts. If you put in for a permit before that date, you got the older post-Bruen rules. However, Hochul claims the new law should apply even to those who applied for permits well before the law went into effect.

Advertisement

To say no one knows really what’s going on is something of an understatement.

However, what can you expect when a law is as rushed as this one? New York lawmakers argue that they had to rush through this because otherwise, the Bruen decision would lead to anarchy or something. However, since the rules post-Bruen already exist in numerous states that have no such state of being, we know it was nonsense.

The truth is that New York is so desperate to keep people from carrying guns in their state that they’ll do virtually anything they think they can get away with to stop it. They can’t just uniformly ban the practice, so they’ll just make it as difficult as possible, even if the law in question is a total rush job and creates nothing but chaos.

Someone is going to do something against this particular law, simply because they can’t get a straight answer as to how the law is supposed to work in a given set of circumstances.

That’s not good law. That’s being so scared of your citizens that you cannot allow them to exercise their rights, even for a handful of days.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member