The speaker of the state Assembly, Sheldon Silver, yesterday ramped up his call for the state Senate and the governor to enact sweeping gun-control legislation passed by the Assembly earlier this week.

Mr. Silver, a Democrat of Manhattan, chided the Republican-led state Senate and the U.S. Congress for not acting on anti-gun bills, suggesting “the radical gun lobby has greater sway in Washington than does the safety of our citizens.”

A little more than a month after two city police officers were shot down within a week of each other, the speaker focused his rhetoric on a bill to ban armor piercing “cop-killer” ammunition.

“Explain to me how we can care enough to provide our police officers with bullet-proof vests, while being careless enough to allow the legal sale of armor-piercing bullets,” Mr. Silver said yesterday, standing in front of City Hall alongside the City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, and more than a dozen other elected officials and gun control advocates. “What does it say about this government’s leadership? Where is the moral outrage?”

Mr. Silver’s statements brought sharp rebukes from aides to Governor Pataki and the state Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno.

“New York already has the toughest gun-control laws in the nation,” a spokesman for Mr. Bruno, Mark Hansen, said. He added that Mr. Silver is “trying to distract attention away from the fact that he is the one person standing in the way of enacting the death penalty for the killing of police officers.”

The heated exchange highlights the division in the debate over how best to fight violent crime, as gun-control advocates battle those who say stiff penalties and strict enforcement – not more regulation – will deter criminals.

Messrs. Bruno and Pataki last month pushed to make the murder of a police officer a capital crime. Assembly Democrats, including Mr. Silver, balked at the move, and the Legislature instead passed a bill mandating a life sentence for the killing of officers.

With the governor’s support, lawmakers also enacted a package of bills to stiffen penalties for illegal gun possession and sales, but Democrats in the Assembly said the new laws do not go far enough and on Monday approved an additional slate of measures.

The bill targeting “cop-killer” ammunition would ban bullets designed to fragment or explode upon impact. Among the eight other bills passed by the Assembly were measures that would ban certain types of “assault” and sniper weapons and make it illegal for a felon convicted of a violent crime to own a rifle or a shotgun.

“When I read about the bills that got passed in Albany, I was shocked some of them aren’t the law already,” Ms. Quinn said yesterday. “How can it be that a convicted felon can get a gun in this city and state? That’s just wrong, and it puts New Yorkers in danger.”

Other acts would strengthen childproofing requirements for guns, heighten requirements on ballistics tracking, and toughen record-keeping regulations on gun sales.

A spokeswoman for the governor, Mollie Fullington, did not say whether Mr. Pataki would support the bills, but criticized Mr. Silver for holding up earlier measures aimed at gun trafficking.

The stepped-up efforts to enact stricter gun control laws come as Mayor Bloomberg has made stopping the flow of illegal guns into New York a top priority early in his second term.

The gun lobby has attacked the push as misguided, saying the better move would be to beef up enforcement of gun laws already on the books.

“A crime is a crime. No matter how many laws you pass, a criminal, by definition of the word criminal, is not going to follow the law,” the president of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Thomas King, said. The group is the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association.