Why New York's Gun Laws Are Insane

They were written by a madman.

From The NY Post:

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.

Big Tim used the gangs to intimidate voters so they behaved as expected at the polls. And if opposition candidates got roughed, well, that's all right too. Problem was, the gangs were shooting up the City, so Big Tim got the State to pass restrictive weapons laws.

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.

Federal studies estimate that armed citizens use firearms over a million times a year to protect themselves. Most of these instances involve the display of a weapon rather then the actual discharge of a projectile. Of course in NY State these numbers are lower.

Meanwhile, savor the irony of an edict written by a corrupt politician to save his bad guys from the electric chair’s now being used against law-abiding citizens from other states.

And the rest of the story? Big Tim was already suffering from tertiary syphilis when he wrote his law. He went mad soon thereafter and was sent to a sanitarium in 1912. He eventually escaped. His severed body was found on railroad tracks in The Bronx in August 1913.

The dedicated lifelong “public servant” left behind an estate valued at more than $2 million.

Apparently State Senator Tim Sullivan and Al Capone had something else in common besides tertiary syphilis, they were both thieves.