Hold on to your bonnet. While Mayor Mike would no doubt love to throw her in the Big Apple’s deepest dungeon for a few years, other local New York City pols are having second thoughts about prosecuting Meredith Graves, the Tennessee woman arrested at the 9/11 memorial earlier this week. As city councilman Peter Vallone Jr. said, “By prosecuting this woman and seeking 3 1/2 years of jail, we are shooting our own [gun-control] efforts in the foot and giving the rest of the country ammunition.” So to speak. The problem – and Vallone sees it quite clearly – is Graves makes the perfect HR 822 poster child…
Quick, swallow your coffee before reading on. From nypost.com:
“Clearly, the laws are too strict here, but that’s something we need to work out for ourselves without honoring licenses to carry guns in states where felons can carry them,” (Vallone) said.
Forget the BS about states where felons can carry guns. Did you ever think you’d read words like that (the laws are too strict here) uttered by a Queens Democrat? What’s changed? Now they have a hot potato in their hands. A law-abiding nurse – a tourist – from Tennessee who merely tried to comply with the “No Guns Allowed” sign she saw at the memorial. Only now she’s in jail looking at serious time. And the local elected officials’ real fear is that Graves will become a martyr.
Yes, she should have knows the local laws. Just as Mark Meckler should have. But this isn’t Plaxico shoving a pistol in his pants before a night out on the town. Graves is a more sympathetic victim of a ridiculously restrictive set of laws in NYC that ensnared an otherwise innocent victim. One who was only trying to comply with what she thought was the law. Just the kind of thing that could potentially turn public (and legislative) opinion in favor of 822. And God knows, we can’t have that. Because passage of 822 would take a fair portion of gun control out of the hands of the locals.
“We have pretty severe laws. Sometimes, cases like this make us question if the laws are up to date and if it was really what the legislators had in mind,” said professor Maki Haberfeld, chair of John Jay College’s Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Department.
“Laws get revisited all the time because of pressure from the public.”
Or as Steve Zeidman of the CUNY School of Law put it,
In my view, the criminal law should focus almost exclusively on people who purposefully and intentionally engage knowingly and unlawfully in criminal conduct.
Glory be. You can almost smell the fear. It’s like roaches scurrying around when the light’s turned on. All of a sudden, you have a sympathetic victim of the Byzantine patchwork of gun laws that exist across the country. There oughta be a law.