https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2022/07/critics-say-new-yorks-new-gun-control-law-will-fuel-mass-incarceration/374742/
If you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last two years, you’ve likely seen the progressive stance of “All Cops Are Bastards/Bad” (ACAB), usually accompanied by “Defund the Police”. The premise being that “since there are bad cops that don’t get fired, or pushed into quitting by the rest, that all are culpable, and thus inherently bad. And since they’re all bad, let’s get rid of them!” Why this only applies to policing, and not literally every other human endeavor, I’m not sure, but such simplistic stances are generally devoid of nuance, so expecting to find any is a losing game.
However, recently those espousing this view seem to have picked up on the volume of anti-gun bills attempting to be rushed into law immediately following several gun-friendly SCOTUS rulings, and support them eagerly. You can often see people spouting their pro-gun control views alongside their anti-cop ones. This is an interesting line of thinking, lets see if we can encapsulate it: “Cops are awful, and kill minorities constantly for no reason, so we need to get rid of, or at least de-fang them to the point that they can’t keep murdering brown people left and right. But, also, we need to empower them to patrol, investigate, and search more people, so that they can physically disarm the country. At least of wildly dangerous semi-automatic weapons!”
But an exceptional example is New York’s current desperate attempt to make carrying concealed in NYC such a clusterfuck of pitfalls and, functionally, legal traps for citizens who are simply attempting to legally express their rights. They’ll allow shall-issue permitting to go forward (because they have no choice), but they’ll make it nearly impossible to do so legally, and expand and empower law enforcement to make it happen. Which will, according to criminal justice reform advocate M.K. Kaishian, lead to “continuing to focus on individual possession cases where the police are in charge of that enforcement just ensures that we’re going to continue to see the over-criminalization of Black and brown New Yorkers,”
Magically, they don’t seem to correlate “Expanded police activity” with their own talking point of “Cops are unequally slaughtering and incarcerating people of color”. We can only suppose they think that when enforcing gun control laws, police will suddenly lose their inherent bias, fear of minorities, and penchant for constant abuse of power. Whatever the thought process that leads one to arrive at the aggressively incompatible viewpoint that cops are terrible, AND we need to empower them to ensure nobody is in possession of newly banned personal property, it’s not one we can reconcile. If your legislative goals require mental gymnastics to align with your moral and civic values, and draw ire from the minorities you purport to be representing and protecting, maybe there’s some more thinking that needs to go on before passing knee-jerk politicized laws.
