Gunning for New York City

I've said before that NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg is the greatest current threat to our Second Amendment rights because he's much smarter than the increasingly sophomoric internet trolls who now run the Brady Campaign and VPC, and because he's seemed to know how to choose his battles.

I may need to amend that position.

At the moment, the greatest threat to his little gun control enclave is the National Right to Carry Reciprocity Act, which would finally make carry licenses universal, just like driver's licenses and marriage licenses.* Since the City has ignored the right to carry for just over a century, granting permits only as political favors, this would force Bloomberg for the first time to respect a right he hates, right in his back yard. Fighting it seems to be his highest priority.

Which is why it's so bizarre that he's throwing respect-mah-authoritah tantrums over three recent cases that so vividly illustrate how draconian the City's carry laws are, and how badly we need the RTCRA. Meredith Graves and Ryan Jerome both made the mistake of assuming they could exercise a Constitutional right in His Honor's fiefdom, and were arrested when they tried to comply "no guns" signs at tourist attractions, asking security where they could check their weapons. As fellow blogger Ian Argent points out, this is exceedingly poor victim selection on his part. One is a pretty young white nursing student, and the other is a Marine Corps veteran, both with squeaky-clean records. You want the perfect pair that the average American will sympathize with and trust? There they are.

The third, Mark Meckler, is easier for Bloomberg's allies to dismiss: jumping up and down shouting "teabagger!" is pretty much all it seems to take. But that case is still just about the best possible illustration of the tyrannous excesses of NYC's gun laws. Meckler was charged with carrying a "concealed" weapon in an airport because he had an unloaded pistol locked in a case while checking it according to the rules of every airport in the country.

None of these people harmed or threatened anyone. It's impossible to prosecute them without spotlighting the very worst of the City's Second Amendment civil rights abuses. And Bloomberg is doubling down on this stupidity at the very moment that he's trying to drum up opposition to a federal law that would prevent this kind of travesty in the future.

I'd given him credit for being able to put his ego and obsession with authority aside when it was strategically necessary to do so. It's looking like I was dead wrong. He's willing to give the good guys three poster children at the most advantageous moment, rather than allow some proles to defy him.

When the smart tyrants show that they're not able to suppress the self-destructive impulses of tyranny, it gives me a tiny glimmer of hope.


[* - Those not covered in icky gay cooties, anyway.]