Mamdani’s Gun Record More Than a Little Troubling

Zohran Mamdani is likely to be the next mayor of New York City. There’s a lot to dislike about the man’s policies, to say the least, but most of those are for our sister sites to discuss. They tend to fall outside of our wheelhouse.

But his record on guns doesn’t.

There, we’re well equipped to look at what he’s said, what he wants, and so on.

And, as Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation notes, there’s a lot to find worrying.

New York City residents already face some of the strictest gun control regulations of any municipality in the country. But if the Democratic nominee for mayor – current New York State Assemblyman and self-described Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani – wins the mayoral election in November, it could quickly go from bad to worse.

In a city plagued by horrible, unthinkable crime, law-abiding New Yorkers have increasingly turned to purchasing and possessing their own firearms over the past few years while crime surged and law enforcement budgets were cut.

…

“We need to ban all guns,” the assemblyman posted on social media in 2022.

That wasn’t a comment from several years ago which he has attempted to walk back, as politicians often  do. This was just three years ago, while the city saw some of the worst crime in the country skyrocket as a result of defund the police budget cuts, criminals looting and breaking into businesses and committing violent acts on innocent New Yorkers and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announcing to criminals that they wouldn’t be punished for committing crimes.

Banning guns, however, isn’t the only anti-Second Amendment policy Mamdani has championed. According to Breitbart News, he also supports expanding the registration restrictions on law-abiding New Yorkers purchasing Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) and even registering the social media accounts of individuals who want to buy a gun, seemingly to monitor the social media accounts of gun owners.

Assemblyman Mamdani also supports expanding the approved reasons for someone to use New York City’s so-called “red flag” law to accuse someone else of a threat, leading to firearm confiscation. NSSF supports these laws only if there are adequate Due Process protections included – but there aren’t any in this case and the mayoral candidate’s platform aims to trample on those Due Process rights even further.

Now, he wants to ban all guns. He can’t, of course, but we know what he wants, and since Democrats all across the nation are fawning over the guy, I think it’s safe to say that, once again, the whole “no one wants to ban guns” thing has been exposed as the lie we always knew it was.

And the thing is, that’s actually the least troubling statement here.

See, I can accept that someone wants to ban guns. Realistically, they can’t, and they also probably know that it’s never going to happen without a constitutional amendment that will never happen, so voicing such a pie-in-the-sky idea doesn’t bother me.

The other things he’s looking at doing, though, do because they might actually become a thing.

Gun registration is a precursor for gun confiscation. It does nothing beyond enabling gun confiscation. Criminals don’t register their guns and law-abiding citizens don’t commit crime, so it’s not doing anything to reduce crime, enable arrests, or anything of the sort.

Registering social media accounts is something sold as an attempt to keep guns out of the hands of extremists, but the issue is that many of those people who support these measures, like Mamdani, probably see all of us as extremists, which is likely the point. Plus, it’s likely to intimidate potential gun buyers who value their privacy too much to hand that information to the government.

Then there’s expanding reasons for red flag laws to be issued. It’s already a problematic, unconstitutional thing, and he’s looking to make it worse.

So while I don’t expect an actual pro-gun candidate to win in New York City, it’s clear that Mamdani is going to be worse for gun rights than most would be. Considering he’s also soft on criminals, that’s a recipe for disaster.