If You Thought NYC Mayor Eric Adams Would Offer Anything Other Than Excuses for Gun Violence, You Need Your Head Examined

On Friday night, three New York City cops answered a 9-1-1 call from a mother seeking assistance for her adult son. Domestic calls are perhaps the most fraught of all the types of calls police officers handle. During his LEO career, my brother only had cause to draw his service weapon on one occasion; it was during a domestic disturbance when both husband and wife decided to kick his ass. Instead of encountering a distraught mother, they were confronted in an apartment hallway by a violent, armed felon who killed one officer, 22-year-old Jason Rivera, and left a second officer and the perpetrator, 47-year-old LaShawn McNeil, critically wounded. See One NYPD Officer Killed, Another Fighting for His Life.

Watch as NYPD executives join @NYCMayor to share details of the NYPD officers shot earlier this evening in Harlem. https://t.co/rvp9ffViWz

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) January 22, 2022

McNeil has a lengthy criminal record, and one is left at a loss to explain how any viable society thought leaving him at large was a bright idea.

According to police, McNeil, 47, has one prior arrest in New York City for a felony conviction of narcotics from 2003 and is on probation for it.

He was four arrests outside New York City. One is in South Carolina from 1998 for unlawful possession of a weapon. One was a 2002 assault on a police officer in Pennsylvania. One was a felony drug arrest and misdemeanor narcotics arrest in 2003 in Pennsylvania.

Police recovered a Glock .45 with a high-capacity magazine that holds up to 40 additional rounds. They say the firearm was stolen in Baltimore in 2017, and they are still working to trace it.

The crime scene was barely secured before New York City’s newly elected mayor shifted blame for this senseless tragedy to a) the federal government and b) the gun.

Late Friday Adams joined his Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell in delivering emotional defenses of the NYPD, expressing anger over persistent shootings and calling on the federal government to increase enforcement of illegal gun trafficking.

“We need Washington to act now to stop the flow of weapons into our cities.”

“It is our city against the killers,” said Adams, wearing an official police jacket, from a podium inside Harlem Hospital, where the officers were taken after being shot by a 47-year-old man in a West 135th Street apartment.

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The NYPD is now working with the Joint Firearms Task Force of the local Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives to trace the gun, Essig said.

The collaboration extends to Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose spokesperson at the Justice Department, Anthony Coley, tweeted that Garland and Sewell spoke earlier in the evening. “He expressed his condolences and told her that the department and @FBI are standing by to assist. He mentioned that FBI is already in touch with counterparts at @NYPD,” Coley tweeted.

State Attorney General Tish James released a statement saying her office “may assert jurisdiction in this matter.”

As the feds touted the collaboration, Adams called for more help from the Biden administration to combat the flow of weapons into New York City, noting, “We don’t make guns here.”

“We need Washington to act now to stop the flow of weapons into our cities,” Adams said.

Naturally, New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo 2.0, Kathy Hochul, joined the dogpile.

Last night, a shot from an illegal gun took the life of a @NYPDnews officer.

When I say we’re going to do everything we can to stop the scourge of illegal guns in our state, it’s not just talk. We are tripling funding for efforts to get these guns off the streets. pic.twitter.com/zXv0xbL4Em

— Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) January 22, 2022

Let’s be serious. What happened in NYC on Friday night had nothing to do with “gun violence” on with Eric Adams’s sniveling. There are already laws that forbid felons from possessing firearms. New York prohibits “large-capacity magazines.” There is no evidence that McNeil’s firearm was part of a gun-running…or ATF gun-walking…conspiracy. There is literally no federal intervention that could have prevented McNeil from being on the streets and armed once New York City decided to put him on probation for a felony conviction and other states elected to overlook his jailbird status rather than hammer him for the half-dozen or so other crimes he committed.

In fact, Friday’s shootings worked precisely as the prosecution policies designed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg were intended to operate.

We need to recognize that not every person charged with possessing an illegal gun in New York City is a driver of violence. The gun in my childhood home provides another example. 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. This was not an idle notion. I vividly remember learning about the presence of the gun when he retrieved it when I reported to him that I believed that someone had broken into our home. My experience is consistent with the data. Studies have shown that people who possess firearms often do so because of fear and uncertainty rather than violent intent. Often, this is driven by economic uncertainty as well as distrust in law enforcement to protect them. Sending these individuals to jail or prison increases the likelihood of recidivism. In short, it does not make Manhattan safer.

Ironically, in this case, a lot of the facts are very similar to those surrounding the murder of a 19-year-old Burger King employee by an armed felon. We know how to get illegal weapons off the street and how to increase the cost of possessing one. Rudy Giuliani showed the way very clearly. Unfortunately, to do so requires courage. But unless and until NYC is willing to hold criminals to account for their crimes, this is all just bullsh**.

If you thought electing Eric Adams as NYC mayor was anything other than replacing one Bill de Blasio with another, you’re mistaken. He will do nothing because, at his core, he is a pro-criminal, Democrat apparatchik who will not buck the existing protect-the-criminal ruling clique to protect either citizens or police officers.