New York bills itself as the state that makes it nearly impossible for prohibited persons to get their hands on a gun. A case out of Staten Island shows exactly who those laws actually burden, and it isn’t the criminals.
The Attack
A 14-year-old boy has been charged with rape, assault, and possession of a firearm after allegedly beating a 37-year-old delivery worker with a pistol and sexually assaulting her at a New York City Housing Authority complex earlier this month.
Police say a black and silver handgun was used to strike the victim in the face before she was sexually assaulted at the Berry Houses in the Dongan Hills neighborhood, near the corner of Dongan Hills Avenue and Jefferson Street, at roughly 6 p.m. on September 9. A woman in the building told PIX11 News the victim dropped off a package and headed upstairs, then never returned.
“I heard a thumping sound, thought she was jumping down the steps, but that was probably him dragging her,” a building resident told PIX11.
The victim was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. The suspect fled the scene, and NYPD spent nearly three weeks tracking him down before an arrest was made Monday morning.
Every Prohibition Ignored
Here’s the part gun controllers would rather you skip over. A 14-year-old can’t legally possess a firearm under federal, state, or local law. New York requires background checks for all firearm transfers and even for ammunition purchases. He also isn’t old enough to qualify for a New York City carry permit — the age minimum is 21.
None of it mattered. He allegedly had a gun anyway.
Investigators haven’t said how he got it. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe it came from a friend or relative. Maybe he bought it on the street. What’s certain is there was no legal path for him to acquire or carry that firearm, and he was carrying one regardless.
The Person Who Followed the Rules Loses
Now flip it around. If that delivery woman wanted a handgun for protection on the job, she’d be looking at hundreds of dollars in permit costs, fingerprinting, references, mandatory training, and a wait of months before NYPD signed off on her exercising a constitutional right. TTAG’s own reporting after Bruen documented that NYC approved only 21 percent of new carry applications in 2022, and the process has, if anything, slowed since then.
Even if she cleared every hurdle, New York’s “sensitive places” scheme could bar her from carrying at some of the addresses on her route. The state’s post-Bruen punitive law designated so many public locations as gun-free zones that even the Supreme Court’s warning against expanding “sensitive places” to cover “all places of public congregation” hasn’t slowed the state down. TTAG has covered attack after attack — including a machete assault in a subway station earlier this year — where the same pattern held: the gun-free designation existed only for the victim.
Whether a gun would have changed the outcome is unknown. What we do know is that New York’s laws didn’t slow this attacker down for a second while stacking the deck against his victim.
