Let me get this straight.
Andy and his Democrat pals have created a killing field in the cities they govern, and he’s using that as an excuse to reassume emergency powers and go back to governing by dictate.
That’s about it, isn’t it?
Two weeks after ending one crisis, he has declared another one. And, lo and behold, it being an emergency, he is going to assume emergency powers, and rule by executive order.
Like he’s done for the last year and a half.
He screws up, people suffer and die, and his response is to arbitrarily take more power to himself, and suppress more of your rights.
As well as funnel more money to his political cronies and advance his pre-existing anti-cop and anti-gun agenda.
It turns out that dead people in New York cities turn out to be a bonanza for Andrew the Small. Where most of us see a heartbreaking fratricide in places like Rochester, Syracuse, Utica and New York, the governor sees a political advantage, a chance to play act at being relevant and to tighten his grasp on the windpipe of his subjects’ freedom.
And so it is that the nation’s first “gun violence public health emergency” has been declared. In Democrat-speak, it’s not “violence,” it’s “gun violence.” People who are stabbed, strangled, starved, burned, beaten and run down don’t count. Death is meaningless unless it advances the Democrat agenda, and Democrats aren’t against death, they’re against guns.
More correctly, they’re against private citizens owning guns.
That’s because armed citizens are harder to oppress.
Central planning tends to break down when the random armed hillbilly responds to new government dictates with a laconic, “Make me.”
So Democrats, at every turn, call for more gun laws and restrictions.
Like Andrew the Small did yesterday.
He signed an effort to bankrupt gun makers and gun dealers, he created a new category of people who can’t buy guns, he destroyed the career of any cop ever disciplined on the job, he opened up confidential traffic-stop records to the government – ostensibly so it can hunt for gun trafficking – and he funneled some $138 million to the non-profits that serve as the patronage farm teams of New York Democrats.
None of which will do a damn thing to save a life or stop the carnage in New York’s urban black neighborhoods.
A carnage, again, which he and his fellow travelers in the legislature are responsible for.
As part of the progressives’ war on social stability, Andy and his all-powerful Democratic pals in Albany have been on a two-year “criminal-justice reform” bender. They have been at war with cops, courts and corrections, doing everything they could to decriminalize crime and the people who commit it. They’ve marched in their F12 parades and defunded their departments and beaten New York law enforcers into broken pulps, cowering in the corner.
And that has had consequences.
Like horrific crime sprees by parolees and people released without bail. Open war between gangs in small cities like Rochester, where infantry tactics turn drug and personal disputes into meticulously planned executions. Where a lack of confidence in the ability or willingness of government to punish wrongdoing has driven criminals and their gangs into vigilantism. If you are wronged, in a system without law, you don’t call 9-1-1, you pull down your nine and go take care of your problem yourself.
When there is no law, there is no law, and the violent become a law unto themselves.
And this is what the Democrats’ war on cops and courts has done. It has enfeebled essential systems of social order, it has driven witnesses and victims into the silence of self-preservation, and it has turned vengeance loose on the streets of New York.
That’s on Andrew the Small and his cohorts in the party of AOC.
They crapped this bed.
They created this crisis.
And now they are exploiting it, for the same cynical reason that politicians exploit every tragedy, real or imagined – to tighten the chains of government around the lives of people, to ditch constitutional safeguards against abuse of power, and to glut their ambitions on our liberties.
And so it is that, two weeks after ending one crisis, Andy has declared a new one.
And he promises to do for violence what he did for covid.
Which ought to scare the living hell out of every single New Yorker.
Because his incompetence and arrogance are clinical, so aberrant as to be some species of mental disorder. And his mishandling of covid killed both our economy and our grandparents. He handled it so badly as to have his conduct during the pandemic now be the object of three legislative or criminal investigations.
Perhaps he’ll write a book about this, too. Or have his staff write it.
Probably he’ll title it “My Struggle.”
But only because he doesn’t know German.