New York Governor Kathy Hochul might be worse on guns than her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, and that's saying something.
She's shepherded a number of anti-gun measures into law. So it's not shocking that she's taking a victory lap over them working...only, well, she should stop.
You see, while she's not exactly lying – the numbers in question actually exist – they don't mean what she says they mean. In fact, they don't seem to mean much of anything, as the former executive district attorney in the Queens District Attorney’s Office notes:
Gov. Hochul issued a deceptively worded statement last week touting substantial “reductions” in crime across New York state in 2024.
“Shootings Down 26% to Date,” it bragged. “Lowest Number of Shooting Incidents with Injury Since 2006.” “Gun Violence in New York State is at its lowest point since 2006.”
“Here is the data, despite what you’re hearing from the fear-mongers out there today,” Hochul claimed in a press conference she called to celebrate her news. “Murder and gun crime rates are down lower than they’ve been in 60 years.”
Well, as a proud “truth-monger,” I must correct the governor on her “data.”
First, the numbers the governor cited came from only 28 of the more than 500 police departments in the entire state.
The report she cheered carries on every page the bold-faced notation, “Current data are preliminary and are subject to change” — reminiscent of the federal government’s recent Bureau of Labor Statistics employment revisions and the FBI’s corrected crime data.
Moreover, those 28 police departments cover just 4.3 million, or 22%, of the state’s 20 million people.
Notably, the report Hochul relied on doesn’t cover a single county in New York City, all of which have Democratic district attorneys.
And let's be honest, we tend to find more crime in large urban areas, which means this claim of how there's all this improvement in the violent crime data means absolutely nothing.
The author of the piece, Jim Quinn, who spent 42 years in his office in the Queens DA's Office, notes that many of those New York City DAs are catching hell over the crime rates and Hochul is using this preliminary data to boost their campaigns.
This wouldn't be the worst thing in the world were it not for one key fact: Most of the counties being counted have Republican district attorneys; DAs who cover 78 percent of the population covered in the report.
Hochul is using the results from Republican district attorneys to protect the jobs of Democrats. I mean, it's not the first time we've seen that happen – Clinton benefitted from the first Bush's economic policies and rode them into a second term, for example – but it's usually not handled so sloppily.
But let's not be fooled, she'll also tout this to claim that her gun control policies are working when there's really not any evidence of this in the least. In fact, nothing we see from Hochul is a reflection of the fantasies in her head versus anything that resembles reality. That's how it goes for anti-gunners and those who seem to think that jail cells should come with revolving doors.