Opinion
New York – -(AmmoLand.com)- New York City’s handgun licensing rules are bloated and absurd as written and adopted, and are arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory in their application. This engenders abuse of discretion. Even worse, the City’s handgun licensing scheme has, in recent years, invited outright criminal corruption in those NYPD officers whose job it is to administer the licensing process.
Stephen L. D’Andrilli, co-author of this article, co-founder of the Arbalest quarrel, and a decorated veteran police officer with the NYPD, pointed all this out when queried about the present licensing scheme in a 2016 CNN Money article, titled, “Only in New York: Bribing cops for a gun license.”
The reporter, Aaron Smith, wrote in pertinent part:
“Buying a gun in America can be an expensive ordeal. Or it can be cheap and easy. It depends on where you live.
Bribing cops for gun licenses could only happen in a place like New York. In most other parts of the United States, licenses are not even required for handguns.
‘New York City, as a major city in the U.S., is one of the most restrictive cities in the country concerning gun licensing laws,’ said retired police officer Stephen D’Andrilli, a former NYPD cop who is now a consultant for clients seeking handgun licenses.
The licensing system is meant to filter out dangerous applicants, like those with a history of domestic violence. But D’Andrilli, who extolls the ‘utmost importance’ of the Second Amendment through his website the Arbalest Quarrel, said the restrictive laws of New York have created an environment that allows a black market to exist.
‘What they’re doing is they’re creating a privilege for having a gun and licensing it and they’re creating this prohibition style system where people are paying someone off to get a gun,’ he said.”
The CNN report wasn’t the only piece on NYPD corruption in the License Division. The Daily News published, on April 25, 2016, an article by a New York attorney and former NYPD Trial Commissioner, Arnold Kriss. The article is titled, “Massive questions behind the blue wall: We need an independent commission to probe NYPD.” Arnold Kriss said,
“For the first time in over 60 years, top NYPD officials are accused of taking money and gifts for favors. Where this will go when the ship-jumping begins and the brass and others start talking to federal prosecutors — non-stop — is anyone’s guess.
This is potentially department-shattering stuff.”
And, one year to the day after the Daily News article came out, WSJ came out with its story on License Division corruption in an article titled, “Former NYPD Officers Face Federal Bribery Charges”:
“Three ex-officers and a former Brooklyn prosecutor are accused of swapping gun licenses for cash, prostitutes, guns and more.
In the scheme, so-called expediters, or individuals who charge clients to help them get gun-license approvals, bribed officers in the NYPD’s gun licensing division, according to prosecutors. These officers then approved or expedited more than 100 gun licenses, including for people with criminal histories, prosecutors said.”
Outright criminal conduct in the NYPD License Division may have been cleaned up, yet serious problems attendant to the awarding of concealed handgun carry licenses in New York remain. These core problems can only be resolved through a massive restructuring and transformation of the entire concealed handgun NYPD licensing structure in the City.
The task ahead is immensely difficult if not well-nigh impossible because the problems that beset the NYPD License Division are inextricably entwined in New York’s historical landscape. New York City’s present Mayor Eric Adams, isn’t the man to take on the task, as he hasn’t the will to do so. In fact, his sympathies rest with leaving matters just as they are.
Even as the City continues a slow burn, Eric Adams’ message doesn’t change when it comes to the issue of guns, for he continues to conflate criminal violence with something called “gun violence”. Back on January 24, 2022, the Mayor said, as reported by Fox News,
“‘We are in the middle of a crisis with guns,’ said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over the weekend.
‘You carry a gun in our city, there is no apology to you,’ Adams added.
New York state and city have some of the most strict gun laws in the country, prohibiting most people in the state to openly carry, but Democratic leaders point to guns coming in from other states as a culprit behind the skyrocketing shootings.”
One should take note that Adams doesn’t draw a distinction between guns as carried by average, responsible, rational, law-abiding citizens for self-defense, and the lunatics and criminals who injure or kill innocent people, regardless of the means employed by these lunatics and criminals. Arming the citizen is not on his radar.
From Mayor Adams’ perspective, the armed responsible, rational, law-abiding citizen is as much a threat to the well-being of the City as are the lunatics and psychopaths who prey upon them.
The problem is that New York City is far removed from being a tranquil, idyllic paradise. It is a hell-scape. Everyone knows it. Certainly, the Mayor does. But he refuses even to consider the fact that arming tens of thousands of innocent people, who wish to take responsibility for their own life and well-being, as is their fundamental right, might succeed in securing for New Yorkers a truly safe environment that, to date, has stubbornly eluded and resisted remedying.
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The Mayor surely desires to reduce the plague of incessant violent crime that has gripped the City for years. Or does he? Is it just gross incompetence, or is it a cultivated habit and predilection against guns that prevent him from trying something new, trying a new tactic that accounts for his failure to get a handle on violent crime that has a vise-grip on the City?
Or is it something more alarming and disturbing that prevents him from relaxing the draconian standards that, to date, preclude the mass of average, responsible, rational, law-abiding citizens from securing, for him or herself, a concealed handgun carry license, enabling the citizen to lawfully purchase a handgun in New York, thereby providing the citizen with the means—the only truly effective means—by which that citizen can protect him or herself against violent, irrational, unprovoked, and random, predatory attack?
Is Eric Adams not unlike the Chicago Mayor, Laurie Lightfoot, and myriad others, who, operating at the behest of creatures like George Soros, see the need for and who tolerate or who even encourage a complete breakdown of America’s institutions and societal law and order so that a new global order can take root of which the remains of the United States and eventually supplant all western nation-states?
And, to that end, is it not the armed citizen rather than the armed and crazed criminal or lunatic that these Deep State Cabal actors perceive as the true problem, the real issue—the constant thorn in the side?
Is it not the armed citizen of the United States—the one inconsonant stumbling block to the creation of a neo-feudal world empire that these Neo-Marxists and Neoliberal Globalist “elites” loathe and fear most?
How can the forces that crush whole nations and their populations ever hope to supplant the independent sovereign western nation-state construct with the global “Open Society” if the one critically important prize—the United States—remains heavily armed, aloof; impenetrable; defiant to the end?
How can the Obstructors and Destructors achieve their goal—merging and submerging all western nation-states into one murky, formless blob, devoid of geographical boundaries; bereft of a defined culture, history, heritage, system of laws, and ethos if Americans, alone, of all western peoples, stubbornly refuse to acquiesce to domination and subjugation?
Clearly, the goal of a one-world western neo-feudal empire will ever be incomplete if Americans adamantly refuse to forsake their natural, God-given unalienable rights of free expression, free association, and armed self-defense against predatory man and Government.
Even now, the forces that crush are employing every conceivable means, psychologically, institutionally, governmentally, to erode and eventually eradicate Americans’ sense of an absolute right to self-determination, personal selfhood, and personal autonomy—in other words, the right to be left alone.
“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions, and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 48 S. Ct. 564 (1928), dissenting opinion, Justice Louis Brandeis.
Keep in mind these words were written almost 100 years ago. Yet, they are as relevant and impactful today as they were when they were first evinced. The natural law rights bestowed upon man by the Divine Creator are eternal, immutable, inalienable, and absolute. Nothing that the Globalist and Marxist Atheists and Satanists do or say can diminish the transcendent Truth and Power of the Natural Law Rights of Man, etched in stone in our Nation’s Bill of Rights.
Americans would do well to take Justice Brandeis’ words as a warning.
About The Arbalest Quarrel:
Arbalest Group created `The Arbalest Quarrel’ website for a special purpose. That purpose is to educate the American public about recent Federal and State firearms control legislation. No other website, to our knowledge, provides as deep an analysis or as thorough an analysis. Arbalest Group offers this information free.
For more information, visit: www.arbalestquarrel.com.
