The strange birth of NY’s gun laws

[TupperHappy]

Recent months have seen a former Marine from Indiana, a Tea Party activist from California and a nurse from Tennessee all arrested and charged in New York City for possession of firearms they had legal permits to carry back home. All were “nabbed” when they naively sought to check the weapon with security.

These innocents fell afoul of the nation’s toughest gun laws. But few New Yorkers know how those laws came to be.

The father of New York gun control was Democratic city pol “Big Tim “Sullivan — a state senator and Tammany Hall crook, a criminal overseer of the gangs of New York.


Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_strange_birth_of_ny_gun_laws_QJmHRpczvWipydklC80HYM#ixzz1jetWaqlE

[SteveW]

1. Lots of ethnic animose as well...

Anti-Italian sentiment was high during this time, and extended to the advocacy of line-item prohibition of Italians owning guns, even for hunting purposes.

NYC's gun laws stem from an attempt by some gangs to monopolize violence. That didn't happen, but the law-abiding were disarmed.

Tertiary syphilis? The downfall of Capone and Henry VIII.

[spin]

2. I found the part about the gangsters complaining to Tammany fascinating...

The Tammany Tiger needed to rein in the gangs without completely crippling them. Enter Big Tim with the perfect solution: Ostensibly disarm the gangs — and ordinary citizens, too — while still keeping them on the streets.

In fact, he gave the game away during the debate on the bill, which flew through Albany: “I want to make it so the young thugs in my district will get three years for carrying dangerous weapons instead of getting a sentence in the electric chair a year from now.”

Sullivan knew the gangs would flout the law, but appearances were more important than results. Young toughs took to sewing the pockets of their coats shut, so that cops couldn’t plant firearms on them, and many gangsters stashed their weapons inside their girlfriends’ “bird cages” — wire-mesh fashion contraptions around which women would wind their hair.

Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, were disarmed, which solved another problem: Gangsters had been bitterly complaining to Tammany that their victims sometimes shot back at them....emphasis added

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_strange_birth_of_ny_gun_laws_QJmHRpczvWipydklC80HYM#ixzz1jgQCrrTd