NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — Mayor Eric Adams promised Thursday that investigators will check New Yorkers’ gun permits by going door-to-door, drawing comparisons to inquiries into his character while he was becoming an NYPD officer.
“If someone is spewing hate, if someone is making a dangerous threat, if someone is part of some form of hate group, the police officer or the detective or the investigator is going to use their investigatory skills to determine if there’s something that’s a red flag there,” Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“When I became a police officer, people knocked on my neighbor’s doors and interviewed them and asked what type of person am I,” the 62-year-old former police captain said.
His appearance coincided with the implementation of new state legislation that sets stringent standards for issuing concealed carry permits and clarifies certain areas as “sensitive” where guns are not permitted, most notably Times Square.
Under the law, applicants for a concealed carry permit will have to complete 16 hours of classroom training and two hours of live-fire exercises.
Applicants also will have to provide a list of social media accounts for the past three years as part of a “character and conduct” review. The requirement was added because shooters have sometimes dropped hints of violence online before they opened fire on people.
Adams said part of that review to ensure there’s not a “red flag” will include a “common sense” basic “analysis.”
“I think those are the same skills that’s going to be used to look at not only social media, but also knocking our neighbors’ doors, speaking to people, finding out who this individual is that we are about to allow to carry a firearm in our city,” he added.
Lawmakers sought to rewrite the rules following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 6-3 ruling in June that struck down a New York state law and loosened the right to carry a concealed firearm in public for self-defense. Specifically, the court threw out a “proper cause” requirement that forced applicants to prove they had a need for self-defense.
A federal judge let the new rules go forward Wednesday evening, hours before they were to take effect.
Despite writing that the arguments for granting a preliminary injunction to stop the rules were persuasive, Judge Glenn Suddaby said the plaintiffs — an upstate New York resident and three gun rights organizations — didn’t have standing to bring the legal action.
Suddaby said he came to that decision partly because the man, a legal gun owner, couldn’t demonstrate he was at risk of a credible threat of prosecution under the new guidelines, among other factors.
While New York doesn’t keep statewide data on pistol permit applications, there were reports of long lines at county clerks’ office and other evidence of a surge in applications before the law took effect.
NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said the department saw a 54% increase in carrying license applications before Thursday’s deadline.
While Sewell said Wednesday at a joint news conference that not much was changing in terms of enforcement, Adams said Thursday that the new law is “game changer for public safety, particularly in a densely populated area like New York City.”
He argued that enforcement of “sensitive locations” will require the NYPD to “pivot and shift.”
“We’re not going to take police officers from those areas where we need police protection because of violence upticks, but at the same time, it is going to really stretch out our law enforcement capabilities,” Adams said.
* Article from: audacy.com
