For measures of national dysfunction and New York’s commendable attention to need, look no further than the debate over access to military-style weapons.
Even after the murders of 31 people in two mass killings – one of them at the Tops supermarket on Buffalo’s Jefferson Avenue – President Biden felt the need to not just to ask, but to beg Congress “do something” about guns.
“Enough, enough,” he said in a nationally televised address on Thursday. “It’s time for each of us to do our part. For the children we’ve lost. For the children we can save. For the nation we love.”
Children accounted for 19 of the recent victims. Along with two teachers, they were slaughtered in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. As in Buffalo, the Texas shooter mowed down his victims with an AR-15, the weapon of choice for American mass murderers.
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New York, meanwhile, responded quickly and sensibly to the evidence before it. The State Legislature on Thursday passed measures that will:
• Raise the age to buy a semi-automatic rifle to 21 and require a firearms license to do so.
• Tighten the state’s red flag law.
• Ban online sales of body armor and restrict those sales to law enforcement and others specifically authorized.
Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to sign the bill, which directly responds to weaknesses in existing state laws. Fir example, at 18 years old, the accused Tops shooter would not have been allowed to buy a handgun at the store where he was legally permitted to buy the AR-15.
The suspect, Payton Gendron, had also previously made violent threats, but claimed they were a joke and thus avoided the restrictions of the existing red flag law, designed to keep guns out the hands of people who show themselves to be a danger.
Gendron also bought body armor online from an Iowa company. Wearing it at the time of the attack, he easily survived being shot by a security guard, whom the heavily armed attacker then killed. The guard, Aaron Salter Jr., was a recently retired Buffalo police officer.
An official of RMA Armament, the company that sold Gendron the armor, said on Thursday that his team was “devastated by this tragedy,” which anyone can believe. But it was a tragedy waiting to happen. Without changes in federal laws, does anyone think it won’t happen again?
That, of course, is the problem with a state response to a national problem. Like Covid-19 or acid rain, what happens in one state is likely to affect another. It’s important for New York to do what it can, but it's essential for Washington to pull its head out of the sand. The likelihood seems remote, given Democrats’ narrow majority in the House and the need for at least 60 supporters in the evenly divided Senate. In those chambers, dysfunction reigns.
It’s fair to argue that access to high-capacity, military-style weapons represent only part of the problem. Issues of mental health, family breakdown, isolation and culture – including gun culture – all play a role.
But it’s whistling past the graveyard to pretend that easy access to weapons designed for mass murder aren’t a big part of the problem. Yet, that’s what too many Republicans do. Either deep in denial or indifferent to suffering of innocents, they pretend that weapons meant to murder by the score are little more than tangential to the issue, if that.
Western New York is seeing that phenomenon play out in dramatic fashion. Rep. Chris Jacobs was endorsed by the National Rifle Association two years ago, but last week, the Orchard Park Republican announced his support for stronger national gun laws. He knew some of those killed at Tops, he said, and with two young daughters, was appropriately shaken by the slaughter in Texas.
But he remains an outlier in a party that clings to the Second Amendment like a drunkard to wine. Too many reject the obvious truth that all rights have limits and, on Friday, that element drove him out of the race for the 23rd Congressional District. It speaks poorly of an organization that refuses to acknowledge the blood-soaked facts.
In his address on Thursday, President Biden appeared to acknowledge the political unlikelihood of banning weapons such as the AR-15. Thus, he said, members should at least raise the age to buy them to 21 from 18. That would help to make New York’s new measure more effective and, in fact, it’s the least that Congress should do.
Unfortunately, when it comes to acting against mass murder, Congress usually does less than the least.
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