Gotta hand it to Democrats - they've been pretty consistent about following Rahm Emanuel's dictum, commonly phrased "never waste a crisis".
Emanuel was speaking of the political opportunity he saw in the gathering financial crisis in 2007 - which did, indeed, turn into a big opportunity for Democrats, not least of them Emanuel himself.
The dictum itself is perfectly good politics, as Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Federation (NSSF) notes:
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. I think America as a whole in 1973 and 1974 -- and not just my view but obviously the administration's -- missed the opportunity to deal with the energy crisis that was before us. For a long time, our entire energy policy came down to cheap oil.
"This is an opportunity, what used to be long-term problems, be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area, things that we have postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity, for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before. The good news, I suppose, if you want to see a silver lining, is the problems are big enough that they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for the solution."
In New York, in the wake of a spree killing involving a deranged man murdering five people, including a New York cop, in an apparent attempt to attack the headquarters of the National Football League, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is going to try not to waste the crisis, and try to export New York's stringent yet fruitless gun control laws to the rest of the nation:
“The killer used an AR-15–style assault rifle. The same weapon of war used in mass shootings across America,” said Gov. Hochul in a statement. “New York has some of the strongest gun laws in the nation. We banned assault weapons. We strengthened our Red Flag Law. We closed dangerous loopholes. But our laws only go so far when an AR-15 can be obtained in a state with weak gun laws and brought into New York to commit mass murder.”
Now, if you're a Second Amendment activist, or even sympathizer, you know the response to this: "Modern sporting rifles", or as the Governor refers to them, "Assault Rifles" (common rifles with military-looking accessories), are responsble for a tiny minority of the nation's homicides - a little over 2% of all homicides involve any sort of long rifle, from AR15s to your grandpa's deer rifle. Which is about 1/4 of the total killed by knives, and about the same as the number killed by blunt objects - baseball bats, 2x4s, or "Occupy Democrats" photomemes.
Not to mention the fact that they are already illegal in New York State:
New York’s law banning so-called “assault weapons” would have captured the rifle the murderer criminally misused in his despicable crimes. That law bans MSRs based on cosmetic features that have no bearing on the how the rifle functions. New York bans rifles that have a folding or telescoping stock, a pistol grip, thumbhole stock, a foregrip (or grip below the barrel that can be grasped by the non-shooting hand) or a bayonet lug.
Hochul's statement blames "states with weak[er] gun laws" - without explaining why those states don't have New York style crime rates or mass shootings.
Tom Knighton of the NSSF addresses the discrepancy between reality and the left's narrative:
As Keane notes, there are a lot of unbannable weapons that kill more people than all rifles combined, not just AR-15s and similar firearms. Those "unbannable" weapons, as I think of them, are things like knives, feet, and clubs. Since knives are essential for cooking, and clubs can range from a weapon particularly crafted to bludgeon someone to death, all the way to a hefty stick.
And feet?
Actually, I wouldn't put it past someone like Hochul to try to ban feet, now that I think about it.
Given that the United Kingdom is mired in an unsuccessful paroxysn of knife control that isn't stemming their epidemic of violence, I wouldn't joke too hard about that.
But if you notice that "whirrrrring" sound? That's the sound of the Second Amendment movement's lawsuit printers warming up.
