AIN’T GONNA BE EASY: ERIC ON GUN EDICT
‘Sensitive area’ firearm bans is one idea mayor is floating
Mayor Adams and his administration appeared at a loss Monday about what the city plans to do in the face of last week’s Supreme Court decision on concealed firearms — a ruling that almost certainly will pave the way for more people to carry guns in New York City.
Last Thursday, hours after the decision became public, Adams and top city officials focused on two areas where the city and state could push back. One is designating certain places in the city as “sensitive areas” where concealed weapons would not be permitted.
The other is revamping the NYPD’s licensing process when it comes to concealed guns.
At the time, Adams stressed that nothing would immediately change when it comes to enforcing the city’s gun laws, but on Monday he said that a shift in policing policy is ultimately inevitable in light of the court’s decision.
“Nothing changes now,” Adams said again on Monday. “But when it gets in full stride — a year from now, you know, a year and a half from now, and you start to see a substantial uptick in guns and people carrying guns — it’s going to be hard.”
Adams noted that he’s spoken with NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell about what the new decision will mean in terms of how the NYPD deals with people carrying weapons, but stressed that the city is still “figuring it out.”
“Knowing that you can be in Times Square, and, you know, hundreds, thousands of people can carry a weapon, then how do you police that? How do you police it in places that are not ‘sensitive locations?’ ” he said. “We’re figuring it out. We’re going to get it right. But I am not trying to downplay [it] ... the Supreme Court really made America a very dangerous place, particularly in New York City.”
Brandon del Pozo, a former Burlington, Vt., police chief and NYPD officer, described the decision as almost completely changing the standards by which city cops will have to do their jobs when it comes to guns.
“Guns in public have been a reasonable suspicion in New York for decades,” he said. “We don’t know where it will go, but it stands to reason that they will be the source of less legal suspicion.”
If that’s the case, police officers are likely to find it more difficult to justify stopping someone for carrying a concealed weapon in the city in the coming months.
How much designating areas as sensitive places will impact cops’ ability to stop suspects is also still uncertain and is a topic likely to be the subject of much legal battle in state court.
In Albany, Gov. Hochul has called lawmakers back to the state capital for a special legislative session to determine what the state can do to counteract the Supreme Court’s decision, which has drawn consistent criticisms from Democratically elected officials in New York.
A significant part of their deliberations is likely to include what the state can designate as a sensitive place, where carrying guns can be prohibited. The court, which is comprised of a majority of conservative justices, signaled that such designations could still be applied, but it declined
to specifically define how, leaving it up to local and state governments.
When asked if the city intends to push for buses and subways to be designated by the state as sensitive places, Adams declined to answer the question directly, stressing instead that he could not afford to make a decision that hasn’t been fully vetted by lawyers.
“We have to get it right. If we get it wrong and try to go outside our scope, we can put ourselves in a bad place,” he said.
“We can’t just classify something as a sensitive location. It must fit within certain parameters.”