YAAKOV M: Governor Hochul, Don’t Take Away Our Guns…Enforce the Law

NEW YORK (Yaakov M / VINnews) — Governor Hochul wants to use the horrific mass shooting that took place in Buffalo this past weekend as a pretext to expand gun control laws.

Despite New York having the “toughest gun laws in the nation” (direct quote from Andrew Cuomo), Hochul wants to ban more guns.

She is ignoring the real issue and pandering to her radical leftist supporters. New York already has laws in place which should have prevented 18-year-old Payton Gendron from obtaining a gun. There is even a law giving police the right to confiscate his guns.

Yet despite that, he was allowed to purchase and keep his assault-style rifle. Hochul should focus on ENFORCEMENT of current laws, not legislation.

Banning more guns will only hurt good citizens, not the bad guys.

It is beyond comprehension that Gendron’s history was not flagged by a background check. He wore a full-blown hazmat suit to school and said that after he graduated, he wanted to commit a murder-suicide. He’d been hospitalized for a mental-health evaluation for over 24 hours. And he posted a 180-page racist, anti-Semitic manifesto praising mass killers and exposing his own radicalization.

He was clearly crazy. Yet the gun dealer who sold him a Bushmaster XM assault-style rifle says that his background check came back completely clean.

That is inexcusable.

If Google can target specific ads by figuring out what kind of socks I wear and which podcasts I listen to, the technology surely exists to figure out that Gendron was a dangerous threat.

New York also has a red-flag law which allows judges to temporarily ban possession of a weapon if there is evidence that someone is a threat.

Robert Boyce, ABC News Contributor, said this: “This individual made a statement last year, and it was addressed by local police, and he was in the hospital for psychiatric. We have something called Red Flag Law in New York to prevent him from possessing a gun on buying another gun. That apparently was not done.”

Furthermore, Gedron was using a 30 round capacity magazine, illegal in NY. He broke the law that bans such magazines, probably by purchasing one out of state. If so, why would banning more rifles like the one used in the shooting, prevent him from buying one out of state?

It makes no sense.

I am a strong supporter of the second amendment. Yet despite that, I believe that the Buffalo shooter, or anyone mentally unstable, should NOT have been allowed to own a weapon.

It’s convenient for Hochul and the Democrats to blame guns and want to ban them. That is always their default position. However if you look at the facts, a ban is not needed, and it probably would not prevent another mass shooting.

What is needed is for Democrats to enforce the law and be tough on crime. It may be harder than passing more laws, and it may not sound appealing to leftist voters, but enforcing the law has been proven time and again to be the only way to prevent crime.

Yaakov M is a senior columnist for VIN News and former Op-Ed columnist for Newsmax. He has hosted a conservative podcast for 15 years. He studied in Kollel for 14 years, was a Bais Medrash Rebbi for over a decade, and obtained semicha from a top Rosh Yeshiva.