Boston, NY Mayors Plan Anti-Gun Alliance
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
The US Conference of Mayors (USCM) has long played an important role in the formulation of anti-gun initiatives. With the help of trial lawyers who had been enriched by the tobacco industry lawsuits, it was the incubator for the string of municipal lawsuits designed to bankrupt the firearms industry and dry up the supply of new firearms and ammunition which began in 1998.
Now, a Jan. 25 meeting of the USCM in Washington, DC, provided a launching pad for the allied anti-gun initiatives of two big city mayors.
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino told the mayors and their aides attending the meeting that he and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg would spearhead what he called a national campaign to eradicate gun violence, according to The Boston Globe.
Menino said that he and Bloomberg, a Republican originally from Medford, MA, would travel the country as chairmen of a panel that would develop federal crime-fighting legislation.
“Everybody talks about it, but if we coalesce around one piece of legislation, I think the Congress will listen,” Menino said in an interview at the meeting of the US Conference of Mayors. “Don’t forget it’s an important year for them. It’s an election year, and each city is facing the same issue.”
After a year in which Boston recorded 75 slayings, the most in a decade, Menino has been under intense pressure to hire more police and stem the flood of illegal guns on city streets. Some mayors agreed that a nationwide campaign would renew hope that Washington would hear the cities’ pleas, but others said it would be foolhardy to wait for federal action.
“Don’t look to the federal government, we have to look within ourselves to have the right solutions,” said Mayor Douglas H. Palmer of Trenton, NJ, who plans to join Menino’s campaign, according to The Globe. “Because if we wait for them, we’ll be kicked out. We won’t even be in office by the time they come back. We have the resources and certainly the citizens’ will and support to help ourselves.”
Boston has seen a dramatic rise in gun violence. After the city’s homicide rate rose by 17% last year, a Globe survey indicated that figure was the sixth-highest percentage increase among 15 cities with comparable populations. Homicides declined in 2005 in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, the nation’s largest cities.
Menino said his panel would help tackle a problem he brings up time and again: the erosion of federal support for crime-fighting initiatives. One example Menino highlighted in his address is the COPS program, a signature of the Clinton Administration that put thousands of police officers on urban streets over the past decade. Funding for the program was slashed from $487 million in fiscal year 2004 to $262.5 million in fiscal 2006, according to data the mayors distributed at the meeting.
Menino has said repeatedly that while he wants to hire hundreds of more police in Boston, the city cannot afford to do so without new federal help.
“We have a problem,” Menino told the panel of about 25 mayors—from big cities such as Gary, IN, to smaller ones such as Racine, WI. “Guns are everywhere, and what’s happening in our streets cannot continue. We must work together. We need help. The federal government is not there anymore . . . cities are expected to do more for less.”
Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago said the panel could help get Congress’s attention.
“Violence has come to suburban areas,” Daley said. “It takes, many times, issues like that to get coalitions of Democrats, Republicans, cities, and suburbs, all together and understanding: Guns have no boundaries. They can go on an interstate highway, they can go on a state highway, and they can go on a local highway, and they’re going to move. And between drugs and guns and gangs, it gets very significant.”
Menino said he proposed the idea to Bloomberg the week before the USCM meeting, and Bloomberg accepted. Bloomberg was not at the mayors’ Washington conference, but offered details in his State of the City address at Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, NY, shortly after the DC meeting.
The firearms-related portion of Bloomberg’s State of the City speech, began, “By now, you know that I never mince words about the urgent threat that illegal guns pose to our everyday lives. Let me describe exactly how we will turn up the heat against all those who menace our streets by carrying or selling illegal guns. This year we will marshal all of our resources and work with all of our partners in public service—whether they are across the rotunda in City Hall up in Albany or in big cities across the nation—both to root out and punish these criminals and to stop the flow of illegal guns into our city.
“First,” Bloomberg said, “every felony gun defendant will be thoroughly de-briefed either by the Police Department’s elite Gun Suppression Squad that we are now forming or by district attorneys, or in many cases, by both. This will allow us to learn much more about where and how illegal guns are sold and by whom. Second, we will pilot new technology that uses microphones to instantly direct video cameras to the source of gun shots, ensuring that shooters are seen as well as heard. Third, we will continue using gun crimes to identify Impact Zones to crack down on shootings. Fourth, when gun offenders get re-arrested for any other crime—theft or assault, for instance—their cases will be red-flagged for prosecutors, judges, and probation and parole officers so that all law enforcement officials will know the threat these offenders pose.
“As we marshal our resources to stiffen enforcement of existing laws, we will also ask our legislative partners to strengthen our laws. We will work with the City Council to enact a one-gun-every-three-months limit on purchases in New York City, and we will urge Albany to pass two pieces of critical legislation:
“First, a Gun Offenders Registration Act—which would be a Megan’s Law for gun criminals. Like sex offenders, gun offenders present terrible risks for communities, and they should be required to regularly verify their addresses with the police. And second, a law to make criminal possession of a loaded gun a Class C felony with a 3-year minimum jail sentence. There is simply no reason why judges should have the discretion to let criminals who carry loaded illegal guns get off the hook with probation. Illegal guns have one purpose: to kill. Period. End of story!
“We will do more than ever to detect and punish gun offenders, but when more than eight of every ten guns used in crimes come from other states, we must reach across state lines.
“And we will. Right now, about 1% of gun dealers account for almost 60% of guns used in crimes nationally. This year, we are going to launch lawsuits against these irresponsible dealers, and we are going to hold them accountable for the terrible damage their guns cause.
“We will also reach out to elected officials in other states to discuss potential policy and legislative changes, and new ways of sharing information,” the New York mayor promised. “In our conversations with our sister cities and states we will not seek solutions that infringe on the rights of gunowners but we will seek to move beyond the knee-jerk opposition that special interests invariably pose against even the most basic and common sense efforts to clamp down on illegal guns.
“Getting tough on illegal guns is not a conservative or liberal issue. It’s an issue of law and order and an issue of life and death,” Bloomberg said as he then listed the names of New York Police Officers recently shot and killed in the line of duty.
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