In the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary slaughter in Newtown, CT, New York state passed an “an expansive package of gun control measures” which read like a progressive fantasy: ban “assault weapons,” create a list of dangerous mental patients and confiscate their guns.

As today’s New York Times details, several problems arose on the road to peaceful Utopia. But, progressives can delight in the news that they’ve compiled a list of 34,500 Americans who no longer have 2nd Amendment, 4th Amendment or 14th Amendment rights. For these folks, New York state is a Constitution-free zone.

Under the “Safe Act,” county officials were to screen and forward names from mental health workers to a state agency. But those county employees did not, generally, have direct contact with the patient, nor did the bureaucrats in Albany. The county workers, quickly overwhelmed with the volume of submissions, began rubber-stamping. The much-touted government oversight became at best cursory, at worst, nonexistent.

Only 278 among the 34,500 were found to have gun permits, and guns were seized from an unknown number of them. But only New York City requires permits for long guns anyway, so a person on that list may go shopping elsewhere, and the government will not know about his purchase. In addition, there’s no way for law enforcement to know whether they’ve confiscated all of a person’s weapons. So, essentially, the program may seize SOME guns from people in a designated zone (NYC), but only if they obeyed the law by getting a gun permit.

Of course, if you have a mental health issue and you treasure your natural, God-given 2nd Amendment right to self-defense, then the law discourages you from seeking professional help with the threat of confiscating your property and your security.

This is all fine with the progressives who love to keep their women defenseless, their poor, disadvantaged thugs unperforated and out of jail, and their government ruling with an iron fist — but above all, who love to be SEEN as doing something about a problem.

Gun control supporters argue a wide net is appropriate, given the potentially dire consequences. Even if just one dangerous person had a gun taken away, “that’s a good thing,” said Brian Malte, senior national policy director of the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence.

Now, Mr. Malte fails to consider the possibility that he may have taken that gun away from a person who then has to confront a pistol-packing burglar in his home, armed with nothing but a Salad Shooter, or a Swiffer mop.

The dangerous truth about all of this “gun control” is that none of it will save a single life. Worse, it will delude a certain portion of the population into thinking that they, and their children, are safer — after all, we passed the “Safe Act.”



What the law has done effectively is to create tens of thousands of second-class citizens, branded as dangerous without criminal charge or conviction, by a faceless system of bureaucrats who don’t know them at all.

Oddly enough, progressives refuse to enact the very legislation that could actually prevent more mass shootings by eliminating the free-fire ranges created by unarmed citizens in “gun-free zones.” They also turn a blind eye to the much higher death toll racked up by inner-city thugs, shooting each other and defenseless passers-by, with illegally acquired handguns.

The list I’d like to see the government compile (he says, facetiously) is the tally of gun-control advocates who own weapons, or who employ armed security personnel.

After all, just because they’re progressive, and therefore abandon wisdom and rationality, doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned self-preservation.