Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘Guns Summit at Gracie’
The fig leaf of “cracking down on illegal guns” tries to conceal Mayor Bloomberg’s general anti-gun offensive. Why? Because gun ownership in New York City is already banned, so cracking down on “illegal” guns is going after all private gun ownership [“Shooting Sports Foundation Asks Mayor To Be Included in Guns Summit at Gracie,” Jill Gardiner, New York, April 25, 2006].
(Under the city’s current laws, fewer than a tenth of one percent of private citizens may have a handgun – well below any statistical margin of error.)
So every time the mayor or the New York Times, Daily News or New York Post deplore “illegal” guns, they are disingenuously attempting to evade the Constitution’s requirement that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
So long as law-abiding citizens of the city are denied that right, a war against illegal guns includes a war against private gun ownership and, therefore, a war against the Constitution.
OWEN C. SMITH
New Canaan, Conn.
