The City Council’s Public Safety Committee, and then the full council, are set to vote today to denounce a bill just passed by the US House of Representatives that would force every state to honor gun-carry permits issued by other states. The House is indeed off-base here — but New York City still needs to get its act together.

After all, Meredith Graves has become the poster child for the House bill. She, of course, is the Tenneseean who brought her gun along on a visit here, never thinking to check whether her carry permit was good in New York — then, while visiting the 9/11 Memorial, asked where she could check her firearm.

But it’s not just knuckleheads like Graves who could get caught up by our gun laws. Imagine an upstanding citizen who’s gone through the background check etc. to get a carry permit in another state and is flying with the gun safely checked in his luggage — until the plane is forced to land at JFK because of mechanical problems, obliging the traveler to spend the night here. He asks where to check his weapon and is immediately arrested. Then he spends 24 hours in jail awaiting arraignment, where he’s released on bail to later return to New York one day and face a mandatory minimum of 3 1/2 years in state prison.

That’s not a nightmare, it’s the existing law in New York state. Reform is needed, now.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve written and helped pass many strict gun-control laws to prevent the flow of illegal weapons into New York, and prevent their possession here. But legal guns, with permits granted here or elsewhere, are not the ones being used to commit crimes, and they aren’t the problem our strict gun laws were enacted to combat.

So how did we get here? Well, back when I was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, the law provided for a mandatory minimum of one year in jail for illegal gun possession, but gave judges discretion under “extraordinary circumstances.” As is often the case, that discretion was abused: I asked for the mandatory minimum in the vast majority of the hundreds of gun cases I was involved in — and can count the number of thugs with guns who went to jail on one hand.

So the law was changed, for good reason, in 2006 (at Mayor Bloomberg’s request) and is now the toughest in the country.

But that leaves us with the unintended circumstances in the case of the laid-over traveler. Even in the Meredith Graves case, the right punishment (for being careless enough not to check gun laws in the state she was traveling to) is some large fine; putting her in state prison is not justice.

What Albany needs to do (and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has indicated a willingness to consider) is to carve out a very narrowly tailored exception in the law to cover people who have gone through background checks and have carry permits from other states who don’t intentionally violate our gun laws.

But Albany must not use this valid need for reform to completely gut our tough laws, as lawmakers did with the Rockefeller Drug laws.

The “Rocky laws” were put in place for the same reason our gun laws were changed: Judges had abused their discretion to let drug dealers back onto the streets in such alarming rates that the term “turnstile justice” was coined — and crime spiked. Yes, parts of these laws were too harsh — but the 2003 reforms took care of the worst excesses, while 2009 changes completely gutted the laws, returning all discretion to the judges. As I warned at the time, this is one reason crime is heading back up.

Yet we still need to fix our gun laws, both for the sake of fairness and to head off that bill in Washington. While our carry laws are too strict (only a few thousand people in New York City have carry permits), New York should set its own standards, and not be bound by the actions of states like Florida, which recently gave 1,700 permits to felons (in violation of federal law).

But with cases like Meredith Graves’, we’re giving the rest of the country ammunition to force passage of the House bill. If that happens, we’ll have truly shot ourselves in the foot.

Peter F. Vallone Jr. (D-Queens) serves as chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee.