NY Governor Signs Off On New Gun Laws Requiring Permits And Banning Body Armor

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has an extensive track record of authoritarianism. 

The same governor that enforced a pointless and ineffective lockdown of her state for two years and argued that anyone refusing to submit to the experimental mRNA covid vaccines and vax passports is going against “the will of God” is now affirming new laws that make rifles illegal to own without permits and that ban life protecting body armor.

New laws also raise the legal age for owning a firearm to 21 and expand on existing Red Flag rules.  This allows all healthcare professionals to file “risk orders” and requires police to follow up on any and all threat accusations, potentially confiscating a person’s weapons based on hearsay and without due process.  

The unconstitutional nature of such laws is not a new issue within the state of New York.  The Safe Act and numerous other laws enforced over the past century in NY are up for review by the Supreme Court this year with rampant violations of the Bill of Rights and the 2nd Amendment coming into question.  Under Hochul’s political leadership the state has become one of the most restrictive in the country.

The state’s draconian policies have clearly contributed to the fact that it now leads the US in population loss.  From 2020 onward NY has faced a mass exodus of citizens citing medical tyranny, bureaucracy and taxation as their primary reasons for leaving.  In 2021 alone, Manhattan lost around 7% of its population, the highest of any county in America.

New York has also suffered from the slowest economic return in the US following its covid lockdown lunacy.  It is still missing over 450,000 jobs from pre-pandemic levels while the rest of the nation has fully recovered (red states most of all). 

Governor Hochul seems to be completely ignoring the connection between rising economic instability and crime as well, while preferring to blame the existence of guns as the core problem.  In March, NYC saw crime rates increase 36% overall from last year, and this is added to the growing crime rates since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.  

As crime and financial distress rise in NY, the state is moving to make self defense a far more difficult prospect.  Gun permits turn a constitutional right into a government granted privilege which they can take away any time they please.  Furthermore, body armor, a product with purely defensive capabilities, is now mostly illegal for anyone outside of an “eligible profession” (law enforcement).  Though, interestingly, some ballistic plates including those used by the Buffalo grocery store shooter are still legal.  This is likely due to an oversight caused by a lack of understanding of the gear being banned; a very common issue among Democrats.

Typically, anit-2nd Amendment legislation is tested out in states like New York and California before spreading into other blue states.  It is then attempted at the federal level; though luckily this often ends in failure.