In March 2019, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, took a victory lap after New York passed its “red flag” gun law, meant to facilitate the confiscation of firearms from people deemed a risk to themselves or others. “Something has to be done because we are literally losing human life” to gun violence, Cuomo said.
The measure doesn’t seem to have helped. In 2018, before the red flag law was enacted, the number of shooting victims in New York City was at its lowest since 2002. Two years later, the city saw almost 1,000 more shootings than the year the red flag law took effect. The number of shooting victims in 2020 more than doubled. One would have to go back many decades to have even a chance at finding a year in which the city’s gun violence rose so dramatically. (John Jay College professor Peter Moskos, a national expert on policing and criminal justice, has produced a striking graphic depiction of New York’s shooting spike.)
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