New York City Mayor Eric Adams is fighting for his political career. Zohran Mamdani seems likely to replace him in the very near future, which probably isn't a good thing for the Big Apple. Adams, trying to hold on, announced the city has cleaned up the streets.
In particular, they've gotten more than 3,000 "illegal" guns off the streets of New York so far this year, and more than 22,000 since Adams took office.
Murders are also down, though that's the norm across the nation.
Still, Adams needs a win against a man who thinks violent crime is a social construct, and he's hoping this is it.
The NYPD has removed more than 3,000 illegal guns from New York City streets since the beginning of the year, officials announced Sunday.
According to the department, the milestone coincides with a record-low number of shootings. In the first half of 2025, the city recorded the lowest number of shooting victims ever recorded in six months and tied its all-time low for shooting incidents.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the effort, which has led to 22,700 gun seizures since the start of the Adams administration, involves officers across the department.
“We seize them during case takedowns, we seize them in the course of arrests, we seize them when our officers run into gunfire on the streets,” she said at a press conference in the Bronx. “Getting guns off the street is the most dangerous work that our officers do.”
That's great, but I have questions.
See, New York has some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation, second only to California and not by all that much. Since Gov. Kathy Hochul took office, the state has embraced numerous anti-gun measures, despite them routinely ending up in court, where they don't fare so well.
Still, the laws that remain are onerous and plentiful.
We're also told by anti-gun activists that gun control laws do, in fact, work.
Yet with so many laws based on preventing criminals from getting firearms, how can they say that when Adams and the NYPD are talking about taking 3,000 guns off the city's streets so far this year?
How can anyone say they work when the NYPD says they've recovered nearly 23,000 guns since Adams took office?
Keep in mind that these are just the guns they found. That means there are a whole lot more running around the Big Apple that they don't know about. All that gun control and they've not been able to stop the criminal underclass from getting them?
I mean, that sounds like gun control doesn't work worth a darn.
It works about as well as trying to deflect a hurricane with a fart, as a matter of fact.
And yet, this will be ignored. This will be glossed over entirely, and no one will be asked to account for this discrepancy between their deeds and their words.
I shouldn't be surprised. I shouldn't even be disappointed. It's inevitable.
It's the inevitability of that, though, that bothers me the most. Gun control doesn't work, and these numbers actually prove that, even as others try to make the case to the contrary.
