New York already has stricter gun laws than many other states in the country and has invested millions of dollars to trace illegal guns, creating a political environment where additional gun restrictions are less politically feasible. But in the wake of more recent spikes in gun violence, national and local lawmakers have prioritized additional funding for law enforcement. The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 a Las Vegas music festival in 2017 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 and a spa in Atlanta last year were all followed by calls for more robust gun control at the state and federal levels. “And yet, things that we’ve been begging for as far as providing better solutions for some of the issues that we’re plagued with like homelessness, houselessness, people with these addiction issues and mental health issues that go in and out of our system and it doesn’t get addressed. Lawmakers have been able to come up with funding for the carceral system that takes taxpayer dollars away from other causes, said Kareem Henton, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Cleveland who is working with a coalition fighting the construction of a new multimillion dollar jail in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Where Democrats once reacted to gun violence - especially mass shootings - by calling for stricter firearms regulations, today they are increasingly turning to greater funding for the police. After a mass shooting on a subway train in Brooklyn, New York, last Tuesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams vowed to double the number of subway cops. He had already sent an additional 1,000 officers belowground in February, in response to reports of crimes on the subway, to patrol platforms and expel homeless people from the transit system.Īdams’s deference to more policing as a salve for gun violence may stem from his own history in the New York Police Department, but it also fits him into a pattern now evident within the national Democratic Party.
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