New York Passes Gun Restrictions; Will the Feds?


The New York Times reports: “Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and lawmakers agreed on Monday to a broad package of changes to gun laws that would expand the state’s ban on assault weapons and would include new measures to keep guns away from the mentally ill.” And get this: The GOP-controlled state senate passed the bill by a “lopsided” margin of 43-18, virtually assuring its passage in the Dem-controlled Assembly.

The news emerges, of course, the same day that Joe Biden’s gun violence task force is supposed to unveil its own package of recommendations, but any effort at gun control may prove difficult, if not impossible. President Obama on Monday said he’d use executive orders to narrow access to guns, but those measures would be necessarily limited.

All of this, meanwhile, has been really good for the gun business: You’d probably already heard reports that gun sales had skyrocketed in recent weeks as NRA types stockpiled firearms in anticipation that the federal government might crackdown on guns. And it appears that the NRA has been warning that Obama Is Coming For Your Guns so long that the stock prices of gun manufacturers actually rose steadily over the last year, largely because their customers were buying and hoarding the product for months and months, sure that President Obama would eventually impose a glorious gun-free utopia on us all. That won’t happen, but we’ll at least get a very nice task force report out of it.