June 26, 2014 | 1 Comment

I Used To Come For Your Guns – Now I Support Your Right to Defend Yourself.

New York City in the early 1990s has been described as many things, few of them complimentary.

The administration of Mayor David Dinkins was plagued with political and police corruption scandals, and some of the highest crime rates in the history of the city. Murders and violent crimes were up, tourism was down. The Mollen Commission hearings saw confidence in the New York Police Department drop dramatically. As a result, crime soared.

On the southeast corner of 181st Street and Ryer Ave in The Bronx stands the 46th Precinct, The Alamo, a place Time Magazine once called, “The Most Dangerous Square Mile In America.” So dangerous a place, that in the late 1980s that the Red Cross refused to send volunteers to help the needy.

And that was where I worked. The “four six” as we called it, was an “A House.” The busiest of the busy. The worst of the worst.

It’s where I became an adult. Where I saw that very bad things really do happen to good people.

The 46th was known for having high violent crime, an old crumbling precinct building, terrible parking, and the best cops in the NYPD. There was a work ethic, fearlessness, and attention to the job that might only be found in a handfull of other commands. I learned too many great lessons to count during my time there.

But I also learned one very bad one. One that I am ashamed to admit I complicitly bought into for a while. And I didn’t learn it from the cops, but from the administration that ran New York City and the NYPD.

That horrible lesson was that gun control and strict gun laws reduce crime and protect people.

Back then I was an apolitical guy. I voted Republican but didn’t really think much about policy positions. I just saw the Democrats giving too much away and being weak on foreign affairs.

Growing up in NYC, guns weren’t part of our culture. Sure, I had friends and uncles who hunted, and I enjoyed the rifle range with my .22, but that was pretty much the extent of it. Firearms policy wasn’t on my radar.

When we did hear a politician discuss guns it was typically in the context of someone being shot, and more needing to be done to take guns off the street. And that all sounded very logical. Why would we want bad guys to have guns?

I never gave any thought to the implications of law abiding people needing to defend themselves, nor to the concept that criminals don’t follow gun laws. Regretfully, I didn’t understand just how important the Second Amendment was back then.

So there I went, into the NYPD Academy a typical New Yorker. I took public policy at face value, comfortable that the government was truly interested in protecting me and my fellow citizens.

Believing that “if you have a gun, the criminal will take it and use it on you,” I was going to be a do-gooder. I was going to aggressively get those evil guns off the street. We were the cops. We were trained. We had guns, you didn’t need one. We were there to protect you.

How wrong I was.

I quickly learned in both the academy and my rookie field training that the cops probably won’t get there in time. In fact, a 911 call by definition is reactive to either a crime in progress or past crime. A victim is being, or has been created.

My first night on patrol the radio chatter exploded. The 911 calls were coming in fast and furiously. I knew I had been assigned to a busy command, but this was something else entirely.

In what I think was my first four hours on the job, I responded to a rape, attempted murder by stabbing, and a guy about my age with his face slashed to the cheek bone then through to his tongue. All three unarmed.

Remember those cop shows where the old timers say things like “in 30 years I’ve never had to pull my gun or put my hands on anyone?” Well, that guy definitely wasn’t assigned to the 46th Precinct.

And this is when and where my pro-Second Amendment evolution began – about a year into my time on the street, seeing victim upon victim. All unarmed. All defenseless.

I began to realize things would have been different had they been armed, because the very few legal NYC gun owners I came across had won their confrontations with criminals.