New York’s strong gun laws didn’t prevent Tuesday’s mass shooting. Local leaders are looking at the feds

Less than a month after a white supremacist shot and killed 10 people and injured another three at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature ushered in a series of reforms to New York’s gun laws. That included strengthening the state’s “red flag law,” designed to prevent individuals at risk of harming themselves or others from obtaining firearms.

That same year, Mayor Eric Adams suggested that the New York City subway system explore the use of gun detection technology on the heels of a mass shooting on a train that injured 10 people. He later followed through on that with a short pilot program of “weapon detection scanners” that yielded disappointing results.

It’s been less than 24 hours since a shooter killed four people in a Manhattan office building and seriously injured a fifth with an assault rifle. But so far, responses from New York’s elected leaders have suggested that the onus for a policy response that might prevent similar attacks in the future lies not with the city or state, but with the federal government and other states. 

“New York has some of the strongest gun laws in the nation. We banned assault weapons. We strengthened our Red Flag Law. We closed dangerous loopholes. But our laws only go so far when an AR-15 can be obtained in a state with weak gun laws and brought into New York to commit mass murder,” Hochul said in a statement on Tuesday morning. “Congress must summon the courage to stand up to the gun lobby and finally pass a national assault weapons ban before more innocent lives are stolen.”

In a series of media interviews throughout the day on Tuesday, Adams echoed the sentiment. While the city is removing illegal guns from its streets, he said, there’s only so much it can do when an individual from across the country with firearms, arriving hours before the shooting, as the NYPD has reported occurred in this instance. Adams didn’t exactly echo Hochul’s specific call to action directed at Congress, but suggested the onus is on other states. “We have strong gun laws here, but many of our neighboring states have lax gun laws,” he said on CBS. 

As the facts of the shooting and the alleged gunman are still being gathered, New York’s law enforcement and elected officials don’t yet have a complete picture, including one that might shed light on any loopholes in New York’s own laws or response that might be tightened to prevent a similar attack in the future. Jaclyn Schildkraut, the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute, noted that it’s still early to know what appropriate local action would look like, and said there’s no one size fits all approach. “Unfortunately when incidents happen, you learn about where there may be a gap in some system that wasn’t working as effectively as it could have. And so then you work to strengthen that particular gap, or to fill that gap,” she said. “I don’t think that any state has it 100% right, but I think New York has certainly moved in the right direction of trying to address as many of those cracks in the foundation of its gun laws as it could.”

Given what has been reported about the shooting by NYPD officials so far – namely that the alleged gunman arrived just hours before the incident and used an assault weapon banned in New York – Hochul and Adams are not alone in looking outside the state for action. 

Assembly Member Alex Bores, whose district includes midtown Manhattan, said that the state will look at “absolutely everything that can be done” and said he trusts the mayor and governor to pursue any executive action that could help. But he noted that the actions reportedly taken by the shooter – from possessing an assault rifle to open carrying – are already banned here. “We could have the tightest gun laws in the country, and yet, what are we supposed to do when someone buys a weapon of war and drives it across state lines into New York?” he said. “It’s a horrible, horrible tragedy, and it demands a whole-of-nation response. And that includes the federal government taking action, and that particularly includes New York Congress members of both parties putting New Yorkers’ lives ahead of any particular lobby.”

Attempts to revive a federal ban on assault weapons have repeatedly failed under Republican opposition in Congress, where Republicans now have a majority in both the House and the Senate.

Rebecca Fischer, executive director of the advocacy organization New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, said that while many of the gunman’s reported actions are already in violation of New York laws, that doesn’t mean local leaders should throw their hands up in defeat. The New York state Office of Gun Violence Prevention or other agencies should be mobilizing to help provide response services, potentially including crime victim compensation or educational materials to the city at large, she said. In other actions that may not directly apply to the circumstances of this shooting, Fischer added that there’s still more for the city and state to do in preventing and responding to more common gun violence, from community violence intervention strategies to survivor services.

“People feel very powerless when something like this happens,” she said. “They already are feeling like public safety is compromised in the city of New York. There’s already concerns about there being more weapons being carried in public spaces. We do not want the result to be more guns in public.”