Speaking to his BFF Mike Lupica about the shooting of four police officers in Brooklyn on Sunday, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly expressed frustration that illegal weapons like the ones used by the perpetrator in the incident continued to pour into the city. “These are the guns that are turning our city into a shooting gallery. We had three cops shot last year. This year we’ve had eight shot already, and it’s only Easter," Kelly said. "I’m tired of this!”
Mayor Bloomberg also joined the discussion with an op-ed in the Daily News today entitled, "Washington Needs To Stop Cowering Before The Gun Lobby." After lauding the city's 35% drop in crime, Bloomberg says the NYPD's officers "are getting no support from Washington—with terrible consequences."
After pointing out that every NYPD officer was shot with an illegal weapon—including slain officer Peter Figoski—Bloomberg urged politicans to "stop cowering before the gun lobby" and pass fixes to the national background check system. A move that 80% of gun owners approve of but a fact that "The ideologues who run the gun lobby don’t want us to know."
Lupica's column includes a strident defense of Ray Kelly's stop-and-frisk practices and the "dumb media idea that Kelly is the one who should be taking fire." Curiously he omits any specific mention of the city's gun buyback programs in a piece about the NYPD's "long war against guns." Instead he writes that the idea that the "bad guys" would "give up [their] guns voluntarily if just given enough time to reflect" is "dumber than the NRA."
This omission of a program that works falls in line with Kelly's comments during a heated City Council hearing, in which the Commissioner asked his interrogators for suggestions about how to keep violent crime in the city down, and qualified it with, "Don't tell me 'a gun buy-back program." Yet as councilmember Jumaane Williams pointed out, his gun buyback program in November took 85 guns off the street, "one-tenth of what [Kelly] did with 700,000 stop, question, and frisks."
