According to Bloomberg the shooting in Times Square, which apparently involved a machine pistol:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg was asked about the shooting while appearing at a Manhattan charity event, and he used the question to discuss one of his signature issues — illegal firearms and gun violence in New York and other big cities.
“We’ve got to stop this,” Bloomberg said. “This is one of the great public health threats. And our police officers are clearly in danger.”
The restrictions on machine pistols are among the strictest I think one can imagine, without making them pretty much blanket illegal, except for military use. It is extraordinarily difficult and expensive for an ordinary citizen to acquire a machine pistol. Most gun owners don’t even really understand what the law is on machine guns and as a general rule don’t bother. If you have the money and the patience, it’s possible to get one, assuming they are legal in your state, which they are not in New York.
Now, I hold out the possibility that this was not a machine pistol at all, but an ordinary semi-automatic pistol that was decked out to look like a machine pistol, since the report says it fired twice and jammed, which is a distinct possibility even with a full-auto MAC-10. They aren’t famed for their reliability.
But one wonders what regulations Bloomberg thinks is going to prevent guns from being stolen from gun owners, short of forbidding them from having them. Bloomberg’s ruse about illegal guns is just that — a ruse. His real purpose is to keep gun owners on the defensive so he will be on better ground when we start dismantling New York City’s gun laws through the courts.
I fully believe now that I will one day walk in Times Square legally carrying a firearm, and there won’t be a damned thing Michael Bloomberg will be able to do about it. That’s what he’s really afraid of.
UPDATE: Beatbox notices in the comments that despite MAIG’s hysterics about Tiahrt, it didn’t seem to interfere with the NYPD’s ability to find out the origins of the gun, and that it was stolen.
I like his use of *public health threat*.
Almost every story I can find says it was a semi-automatic. Yesterday, initial reports said it was a machine pistol, the ones later in the day said it was semi-auto—and at least one of them changed it from “semiautomatic machine pistol” to just “semiautomatic pistol.”
It’s a machine pistol in the same way that every AK-type rifle used in a crime is an AK-47 machine gun.
“But one wonders what regulations Bloomberg thinks is going to prevent guns from being stolen from gun owners, short of forbidding them from having them.”
This is a commonly-cited justification for the requirements to own gun safes that you’ll find in, for example, Canada and the UK. That they wildly increase the burden of gun ownership and decrease the number of people who’ll fight the next round of restrictions is, of course, purely incidental.
It would seem that Heller mostly took this kind of requirement off the table, but I wouldn’t be shocked to see some anti-gunners pushing mandatory gun safes as a means of fighting the “flow” of guns from law-abiding purchasers to criminals. They could at least argue that a requirement to lock _unattended_ guns in enclosed, approved safes wouldn’t violate Heller’s self-defense rationale.
Did you notice that despite of the Tiarht amendment, the police were able to determine in a matter of hours that the gun had been purchased in Virginia and reported stolen in Richmond?
Hmmm…
Ha! I didn’t notice that, but it’s a great point.
Cemetery you aren’t the only one. I also noticed Bloomberg saying, “This is one of the great public health threats.”
The ‘public health threat’ B.S. is a gambit going as far back as the Clinton years, but as we can all see it is still current boilerplate anti-gun rhetoric. This is why vigilance on so-called “health care reform” is warranted.