Don’t ask, don’t tell.
That’s how gun owners and law-enforcement officers should approach New York’s unconstitutional new gun law.
I won’t tell you what I’m carrying, and don’t you ask me what I have.
We may be the targets of illegal oppression, but we don’t have to be accomplices to it.
Beginning today, carrying handguns is prohibited almost everywhere in the state of New York. They can’t be carried on public property, and they can’t be carried on private property unless the owner or lessee posts a large sign declaring that they are welcome.
When you eliminate public property and private property, that’s all property, and the New York concealed carry permit becomes meaningless anywhere but in your home and in your car – unless it’s parked in a school, hospital or government parking lot, where it’s illegal.
Two months after the United States Supreme Court said Americans have a constitutional right to carry a firearm outside their home for self-defense, Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul and her party have eliminated that right in New York.
And so it falls to New York gun owners to obey the Democrat law, and it falls to New York police officers to enforce it. I wonder if they will, and I wonder if they should.
I wonder where their consciences will come down.
I wonder what citizens will decide as they weigh the right to self-defense against the duty to be law abiding. I wonder what police officers will decide as they weigh the part of their oath obligating them to enforce the law against the part of their oath obligating them to obey the Constitution.
And I wonder what officers will decide as they consider that their spouses and parents are stripped of the ability to defend themselves in a violent world by this new law. And I wonder what they think as they realize that they are themselves one edited cellphone video away from losing their jobs and their own ability to carry a gun to defend their families.
The governor is demanding obedience to a law which she herself passed in violation of law. She will not obey the Supreme Court, but we must obey her? We are to ignore a constitutional amendment passed in 1791, but we must obey a law pulled out of her Democrat ass at the end of June?
Is that what New York’s deputies and troopers and officers are being ordered to enforce? They will arrest their neighbors and friends for that?
A woman with a pistol permit who carries a firearm for self-defense becomes a felon because she has her hidden handgun with her while she does her grocery shopping? Or while she jogs through a park? Or goes out to dinner?
Did New York’s police officers take up their profession to put people like that in the back seat of the car? Is that why they carry handcuffs? Has their time in law enforcement taught them that there is no need for New Yorkers to be able to defend themselves?
Is New York law that sacrosanct that it must always be obeyed? Like the April 1st legal mandate to pass a state budget? Or is it just the citizens who must obey it, not the politicians?
Like the federal immigration law, which New York openly flouts and which state officials have forbidden local law enforcement officers to assist in enforcing. In New York, when is the law the law, and if they get to decide when it isn’t, do we get to decide that, too?
The governor’s anti-gun law violates Article III, Amendment II and Amendment X of the United States Constitution. It ignores the primacy of the federal judiciary, it erases the right to bear arms, and it takes to the state a power reserved by the Constitution to the federal government. Her law is illegal.
And the people have to decide if they are going to obey it, and the police have to decide if they are going to enforce it.
That’s what free people and free societies do.
Obedience to law is a duty of citizenship, and Abraham Lincoln said it should be our national religion, taught by mothers to the children on their laps. But illegal law is not law, it is caprice, dictate and oppression.
People obey the law because it obeys them, it being of their creation. But when it fails to obey them, by violating their rights and ignoring their will, they are prone to disobey it.
And the dictator only rules as long as the people submit and the authorities enforce.
And New York will now learn to what extent they will.
Will the people be citizens or subjects, and will the law enforcement officers be cops or henchmen?