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New York (State and City) has an obsession with blaming weapons (and potential weapons) for crime, they have a web of arcane and nonsensical laws which tend to
by microcolonel 9y ago
New York (State and City) has an obsession with blaming weapons (and potential weapons) for crime, they have a web of arcane and nonsensical laws which tend to penalize common people who want to believe that the laws are reasonable, and are surprised to find out just how unreasonable they are. The officials of course love these laws. They've made the public so wary of "weapons" that it's valuable for them to invent as many "weapons offenses" as possible.
I wonder if New York's approach to weapons laws has roots in their switch from slave state to free state (which was late for the region) like so many laws in other states. Texas took until the '90s to manage to annul their prohibitions on the concealed carry of handguns (they were no-issue up until 1995) which were clearly initially intended to be enforced selectively against the emancipated.
- CalChris 9y agoNew York abolished slavery in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804. Pennsylvania was first in 1780. What you're 'wondering' is right wing nonsense.
- theWatcher37 9y agoRacism totally existed in “free” states. His argument his the laws were more sneaky about it, since you couldn’t just say “no guns for blacks”
- CalChris 9y agoNope. He didn’t say racism. He said slavery. I’m quite familiar with these slippery slope style arguments.
- microcolonel 9y agoRacism was a major factor in the public's wariness of the emancipated slaves, so it's part of it. Either way, new laws intended to be selectively enforced against emancipated slaves and other undesirables are a feature of the 1800s (and to a lesser extent, the early to mid 1900s). That was what I was getting at. By "late for the region" I meant compared to their neighbours to the North and East (Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, The Vermont Republic†) and Pennsylvania. † Not a state at the time, for the obvious reason of being an unrecognized secession from New York, for the purpose of (among other things) abolishing adult slavery.