“A Harvard-educated lawyer who works for Gov. Cuomo was shot in the head when he was suddenly caught in the middle of a Brooklyn gunfight before Monday’s West Indian Day Parade, authorities said. First Deputy Counsel Carey Gabay, 43, who was appointed to the post in January, is now on life support as doctors prepare to harvest his organs later in the day, law-enforcement sources said.” The shooting occurred in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn. For the geographically impaired, that’s part of New York City, one of the most gun-controlled locales in the country . . .
“It was just totally random. Some guy walked up and was spraying bullets everywhere. I can’t believe it. He was a good guy, he just didn’t deserve this’’ said Gabay’s weeping younger brother, Aaron McNaughton, who was with him at the time.
It is, of course, a terrible tragedy that a father-to-be would be the victim of such a senseless act. And before the usual suspects spout their sage advice in the comments about the need for razor-sharp, head-on-a-swivel situational awareness, by all accounts this was a random act of violence that even the keenest spidey senses likely wouldn’t have mitigated.
Mr. Gabay seems to have been unfortunate enough to have been at the wrong place at the wrong time in which one morally bankrupt individual, lacking in cultural guardrails, decided to settle a dispute by opening fire in the middle of a crowd. It can happen just that quickly and Gabay paid the price.
There is virtually zero chance that the shooter had a license to carry his gun (which was also likely procured illegally). And despite the city’s famously restrictive gun laws and the state’s vaunted SAFE Act (giving “New York State the toughest, strongest protections against gun violence in the nation”), all the governor’s horses and all the governor’s men can’t keep those who would obtain and use firearms illegally from doing so. All their grandiose pronouncements to the contrary. Just ask Mr. Gabay’s soon-to-be widow.
[h/t Dirk Diggler]