The right to keep and bear arms is just that, a right. This means that in order to curtail it, it’s on the other side to show definitively that such curtailment is absolutely necessary.
We shouldn’t have to show anything to justify keeping our rights. Yet all too often, that’s precisely what we have to do. We’re forced to show how concealed carry doesn’t lead to increase shootings or how gun ownership doesn’t correspond to higher homicide rates.
Yet New York Gov. Kathy Hochul displays all the hypocrisy one should expect from the anti-gun side of things.
Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she doesn’t “need to have numbers” to back up her strict gun control proposals.
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Speaking at a press briefing Wednesday, Hochul said after the high court overturned the law, gun owners would carry more.
A reporter then asked whether Hochul had any data to support her gun control push.
“Do you have the numbers to show that it’s the concealed carry permit holders that are committing crimes? Because the lawful gun owner will say that you’re attacking the wrong person, that it’s really the people getting the guns illegally that are causing the violence not the people going and getting the permit legally. Do you have the numbers?”
“I don’t need to have numbers. I don’t need to have a data point to say this. I know that I have a responsibility to the people of this state to have sensible gun safety laws, and this one was not devised by the Hochul administration. It comes out of an administration from 1908. I don’t need a data point to say I have a responsibility to protect the people of this state.”
This is a constitutionally protected right, one that specifically states that it shall not be infringed, and she’s going to stand there and say she doesn’t need to provide evidence that her proposals are absolutely necessary?
Like hell she doesn’t.
I vehemently oppose any infringement on any of our rights, but I get that many people don’t feel the same way. However, at a minimum, people should demand lawmakers show some kind of evidence that any curtailment of those rights is absolutely necessary.
Yet Hochul stood there and said she didn’t need to do any such thing.
She says she has a responsibility to protect the people of New York, but where’s the evidence that this actually will? Where’s the evidence that gun control actually does protect the people of a given state. As we’ve already seen, much of the “evidence” out there is suspect.
But Hochul won’t even provide that to defend her assertion that gun control is absolutely necessary.
I’d ask why the mainstream media isn’t hammering her for this, but I already know why. They asked the question, sure, but there doesn’t seem to have been any outcry from them.
Which would have been a different case entirely if this had been about infringing on freedom of the press and we all know it.
What they don’t get is that curtailments of the Second Amendment will inevitably lead to curtailments of all other freedoms.
Meanwhile, they’ll try and put the onus on us to present evidence as to why we shouldn’t have our rights curtailed when that’s really not how any of this should work.
Honestly, there’s enough hypocrisy to go around. It’s not just Hochul.