When “people do not feel protected by the police,” [Philadelphia DA Larry] Krasner notes, they may “view the risk of being caught by police with an illegal gun as outweighed by the risk of being caught on the street without one.” Before he was elected, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg expressed a similar concern.
“We need to recognize that not every person charged with possessing an illegal gun in New York City is a driver of violence,” Bragg said on his campaign website. “My dad had an illegal gun not because he liked guns or because he was ‘dangerous’; he had a gun because of crime in the neighborhood.”
Bragg has since retreated from that stance, echoing [New York Mayor Eric] Adams’ determination to vigorously prosecute people who carry guns without the government’s permission. But law enforcement agencies cannot redeem their failure to protect public safety by locking up people who respond to that failure by exercising the constitutional right to armed self-defense.
Jacob Sullum in Grabbing Guns Won’t Reduce Urban Violence
