Steuben Courier Town Square

Earlier this week, in a rush to be the first, Governor Cuomo signed into law the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, the purpose of which is to “protect New Yorkers by reducing the availability of assault weapons and deterring the criminal use of firearms while promoting a fair, consistent and efficient method of ensuring that sportsmen and other legal gun owners have full enjoyment of the guns to which they are entitled.”  

Notice that the acronym for the act is SAFE, which is why ammunition seems to be more important than firearms in the title despite most of the focus of gun control being on the actual guns.  But you can’t have a SAFE Act without the A coming after the S.  Otherwise it would be the SFAE Act, which doesn’t sound nearly as good for you.  It’d easy to be against the SFAE Act, but much harder to be against the SAFE Act because it says “safe” right in the title.  Who could be against being safe?  This is Branding 101.  Moving on…

This article is only obliquely about gun violence or gun control.  I’ve written about both in this column and in other places.  I’ve discussed statistics and something called misleading vividness.  When told to compare gun violence in the US to western nations of a similar economic status I have done so, using Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Switzerland to make the point that the availability of guns and their correlation to firearm homicide is not a black and white issue.  I've heard what happens to gun violence and crime when you disarm Austrailans and, conversely, those in England.  I have posited that despite being highly regulated, motor vehicles and the negligence of their operators are responsible for at least as many deaths as firearms and far more deaths than firearm-enabled homicides.  I have contended that we already have strict laws against murder.  I have discussed the Second Amendment, the Framers’ intent for that amendment, heard the “different world” speech, argued against the notion that because the Framers knew only black powder muzzleloaders they wouldn’t have approved of anything more advanced, and have even been sucked into conversations about the likely success of revolution given that Americans have only “assault rifles” whereas the military has tanks and airplanes (conversations more silly than most).  I’ve heard that Americans don’t “need” guns any more than they “need” a rocket launcher.  I’ve been asked why anyone “needs” an assault rifle, which is an arbitrary moniker if there ever was one.  Ironically, I’ve found myself perplexed that I must provide justification for my need of the basic amendments found in the Bill of Rights.  Wouldn’t it be rather foolish sounding to be asked to defend your “need” for free speech?  Wouldn’t it be absurd to defend your need for the Fourth or Fifth Amendments?  What about the Third?  If so, why do we argue over the need for the Second Amendment?  The defense of those needs was hashed out with the British a couple hundred years ago.  I figured that the need for those amendments was pretty obvious even if we live in “a different world.”

I could write a very lengthy treatise discussing in detail the various aspects of the SAFE Act and how the act is itself a poor effort in dealing with firearm violence.  For example, the act makes it illegal to load more than seven rounds in any magazine.  How do you enforce that, and what happens to the person who inadvertently loads eight rounds and is discovered to be in violation of the law?  Given that magazines are easily and quickly changed, how does this protect New Yorkers?  The act also lowers the requirements for a weapon to be considered an assault rifle from two “military style” features to one.  No one has yet explained to me how a pistol grip makes a weapon intrinsically more deadly; it does not increase the velocity of the projectile fired or make that projectile explode.    

All of this has and will continue to fall upon the deaf ears of the people who advocate more and more restrictive gun controls as the primary solution to the problem and by and large it is intellectually exhausting.  But everyone, including those who applaud gun control, should be concerned with how new gun laws are being enacted.  The SAFE Act was introduced to the state senate on Monday (14 January), approved, and passed to the assembly the same day.  The assembly approved it on Tuesday (15 January), returned it to the senate that day and it was then delivered to the governor who signed it into law.  On the same day.  Normally, three days must pass between the introduction of a bill and a vote.  But this was waived, with Cuomo saying, “If there is an issue that fits the definition of necessity, I believe it’s gun violence.”  Untold lives were no doubt saved by waiving the three day waiting period.  Senator John Bonacic issued a statement on Monday saying that as of 8 pm the text of the bill had not even been made available to senators who were required to vote on it.  I have heard that senators had as little as 20 minutes to read the 81 page bill.  Senators thus had to read and digest 4 pages of legalese per minute after working what I assume was a full day.  As I understand it, not a single New Yorker was privy to the contents of this bill, and had absolutely no opportunity to weigh in on it before it was passed and signed into law. 

Some people have stated that they are proud of the governor and the legislature for having the courage to finally do the right thing.  Even if I agreed with the contents of a given bill, rushing legislation through without discussion does not sound like the right thing to me, nor does it sound particularly courageous.  It sounds like cowardice and tyranny.  Cowardice and tyranny should never make you feel proud, even if you agree with the end results. 

In similar news, President Obama, flanked by school children, issued twenty three “executive actions,” that are designed to reduce gun violence.  This plan allocates gobs of money, possibly as much as $45 billion, to all sorts of things, such as $50 million to help schools “create a safer more nurturing school climate.”  What does this even mean, and how is it measured as successful?  Many people on the left, including the quasi-independent New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, urged the president to step over Congress and use his ever-growing executive powers to enact tougher gun regulations.  Though the president’s “executive actions” fell short of that call, the fact that our citizens believe that the president has the authority to side step Congress should be terrifying.  And I blame both liberals and conservatives for harboring such sentiments. 

It seems that expediency in achieving an ideological goal is more important than almost anything else, including careful and thoughtful deliberation, and too often we let our emotional reaction to horrific events get in the way of sound decisions.  It is how we ended up with a bloated and inefficient TSA and the ever-redundant DHS.  It is how we got the USA PATRIOT Act, the NDAA Act of 2012, and the power the president has to execute US citizens abroad without due process.  It is how we ended up in two costly wars and have what will no doubt be an increased presence in places like Mali. 

It really doesn’t matter to what party you belong, you should be offended at the way in which the SAFE Act was handled just as you should be offended at the notion that the executive can act unilaterally.  We must remember that power cuts both ways.  Today you may applaud an overreaching government when it achieves a win on a pet issue, but tomorrow, when the other party is in power, you will lament that the government was able to undermine or destroy something important to you. 

The saying “freedom isn’t free” is true.  It isn’t free.  Freedom is hard and frustrating and sometimes, when we don’t agree that someone should have a particular freedom, it doesn’t make any sense.  But freedom is also risky.  We cannot remove or even, in most cases, mitigate risk while maintaining freedom.  We must decide what is more important.  I confess that I fear your decision.

Word of the Day: Hypnopompic (adj): Of or pertaining to the semiconscious state prior to complete wakefulness. 

On This Day in History: The Roman emperor Theodosius, who banned the Olympic Games, advanced the Nicene Creed, and established Catholicism as the official church of the empire dies (395 CE).  Eisenhower warns of the growing military-industrial complex in his farewell address (1961).  Operation DESERT STORM begins (1991).

“There are steps that President Obama can take without congressional approval at any time he chooses with just one stroke of the pen.” – Michael Bloomberg.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” – James Madison.