Cuomo Moves on Sweeping Gun Control

New York State can do what it wants, I honestly have given up after realizing that New Yorkers and Texans have very little in common. Texans can read and understand the words “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Evidently most New Yorkers cannot.

So Gov. Andrew Cuomo, liberal statist politics in his DNA, is proposing three sweeping changes, two of which are bad ideas and one of which will make no difference when it comes to stopping shooters like the Newtown killer.

Sources said the package is expected to include:

* New restrictions on assault weapons
* Stiffer penalties for using a gun to commit a crime
* New limits on the number of bullets in a gun magazine

“Assault weapon” is a meaningless term. Change it to “scary looking guns that liberals don’t understand” and you’ll be closer to the truth. Limiting magazine sizes can be overcome with duct tape, and may impair the law-abiding citizen’s ability to defend ourselves from killers that the state routinely releases back into the wild. Stiffer penalties for crimes involving guns is fine, but would it really stop someone like the Newtown killer or the Columbine pair? They killed themselves after killing others. Most of these high profile mass murderers are suicidal. The ones who aren’t tend to be egomaniacs who don’t care what happens after their spree gets them in the news. The worst elementary school killer in US history — Andrew Kehoe — did not use a gun, never played a video game, plotted his crimes for about a year, and killed himself once he had achieved his revenge. Sentencing his fragmented corpse to a million year sentence would not have changed a thing.

In Texas we’re responding to the Newtown tragedy a little differently. Gun control as such is not on the agenda of the legislature, whose session opened today. There is a bill in the works to allow teachers concealed carry in classrooms, though. We recognize that our children are more precious than the money we protect with armed guards in our banks, and that our personal freedoms should not be taken away because some career politician thinks they know better than we do.

They don’t. Many of them have no real world experience outside their bubbles of wealth and 24/7 protection. In a sane world, we could take turns mocking and then ignoring them.