Assembly ambushes gun owners with early vote on 4 bills

April 28, 6:16 PMNY Libertarian ExaminerJim Lesczynski

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Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (right) supports expiration on self-defense. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

The New York State Assembly passed at least 4 bills today that would further restrict gun rights in the state, according to the Assembly’s website. Additional anti-gun bills are like to be passed before the Assembly adjourns this week. Although the passage of the bills was hardly a surprise – the Assembly perennially votes for a slew of anti-gun legislation each year, only to see it stall in the formerly Republican-controlled Senate – the timing of today’s votes raised eyebrows.

The bills were originally scheduled to be voted on tomorrow, April 29, as part of the annual “Gun Bill Day” in Albany, when groups such as New Yorkers Against Gun Violence show up for a day of press conferences and photo-ops with their Democratic puppets.

This year, however, New York’s gun-rights community decided to fight back and make their presence felt. The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association and the Shooters Committee on Political Education (SCOPE) had planned to bring 5,000 of their members to Albany to counter-protest the victim-disarmament crowd.

When Assembly leaders got wind of the gun owners’ plans, they rescheduled the anti-gun votes for today. Ken Mathison, president of SCOPE, says the gun owners still plan to go to Albany tomorrow anyway, but their focus will now turn to slowing down the counterpart bills in the State Senate.

In previous years, the outcome of anti-gun bills in the Senate was rarely in question, because the upper body had been controlled for decades by the Republican Party, which is at least marginally friendlier to gun owners than the Democrats. (Gun owners, however, still remember the betrayal of the last “pro-gun” Republican governor of New York, George Pataki, who sold the Second Amendment down the river at the first opportunity.)

Now that the Democrats control both houses of the state legislature, gun owners and civil rights activists have cause for concern. Among the bills that passed the Assembly today are a five-year renewal period for pistol licenses and a mandatory firearms safety course for renewal.

“We are one step closer to requiring every county in New York State to follow the practice currently in place in New York City and Long Island,” Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said in a statement.

The New York Police Department has been known to deny renewals when licenses expire, and gun owners are not notified when expiration is imminent. Presumably Silver would like to see that practice adopted upstate as well.