After the Tucson, AZ shooting rampage that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically injured, six dead and 13 others injured, the Post suggested that not only the Glock corporation—which made the gun that suspected shooter Jared Lee Loughner used—stop selling to civilians, the newspaper said that NYPD should stop buying weapons from Glock until the company stops selling to civilians. Now, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has voiced his support having the NYPD ban Glock, but Mayor Bloomberg is less enthusiastic.
The Glock 19 that Loughner allegedly used had a magazine holding 31 rounds. de Blasio, who is hardly an ally of the Post, said, "If Glock will not stop selling these magazines to consumers, then the New York City Police Department should start buying the firearms they need from a different company. The New York Post editorial board has rightly argued that the Glock-manufactured 30-round magazines, like the one used by clearly disturbed Jared Loughner, present an unacceptable risk to human life, and at the same time no justifiable civilian purpose." But Bloomberg only told the paper it's an "interesting idea," a tepid response the Post thinks is crazy, given Bloomberg's gun control views.
Bloomberg clarified his problem with the boycott idea this morning on WOR, explaining that the NYPD gets guns from Smith & Wesson and Sig Sauer as well, and those guns have magazines, too: "The trouble is, if we boycott one, you probably have to boycott all of them and then you go back to the days when the crooks had better guns than the cops. We don’t want our cops out-armed, out-gunned. Back in the day when they were out-gunned, we had 2,000 murders. Today there’s not 2,000 murders, there’s a quarter of that. There’s a lot of things that went into lowering the crime, but arming the cops was part of it."
