Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Queens is a borough in New York City. That means it’s under some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, laws that have been in place for more than a century. If what we’re told about gun control, namely that it works, then Queens shouldn’t have an issue with people having guns who aren’t allowed to have them.
And yet, a recent incident suggests that’s not the case.
A 14-year-old boy was arrested on Tuesday after he was caught with a loaded gun at his Queens high school, police said.
Just after 12:30, school safety agents observed the student drop the gun while walking up a stairway at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Bayside, according to police and sources.
The security officers grabbed the teen and recovered the loaded .22 caliber handgun, police and sources said.
Officials say they don’t know what the student intended to do with the gun–whether it was just a case of having it for the sake of having it or whether he had a plan to use it. All we know is that a 14-year-old kid in Queens had a handgun.
Now, a 14-year-old can’t lawfully purchase a firearm anywhere in the nation. That means it’s unlikely he lawfully possessed that weapon and we all know it.
Yet aren’t the gun control laws there supposed to prevent that from happening?
Clearly, they don’t work.
Unfortunately, though, some will look at this and argue the problem isn’t that gun control didn’t work but that there’s just not enough gun control. It’s hilarious how often they keep pushing for failed policies. They keep thinking that the failure is the result of not enough gun control rather than the simple fact that gun control doesn’t work.
This is a 14-year-old kid. There’s no way he lawfully obtained that gun and was just allowed to take it to school. There’s no way that happened, but that will continually get ignored in the discussions.
Meanwhile, we’re told we don’t care about kids because, if we did, we’d pass gun control. You know, the kind of laws that did nothing to prevent a kid from being armed.
The truth is that Queens and NYC in general have no way to keep guns out of the hands of kids who are linked up with criminal gangs, which is likely what happened here. The black market dealers care nothing about ages or anything else. They’ll put a gun in anyone’s hand, including a child’s.
This happens in other places as well.
Yet if we were to undermine the very roots of our violence problem, we might have prevented this kid from potentially ruining his life with a firearm. Instead of trying to take a gun to school, he wouldn’t have taken anything more dangerous that Pokemon cards or something.
Instead, here we are.
Gun control doesn’t address this. Moreover, it can’t address this. Gun control doesn’t stop activity like this, it merely criminalizes the things you or I might like to do.