One year ago, Second Amendment absolutists, some of them carrying vile posters that likened Gov. Cuomo to Adolf Hitler, shouted that sensible new New York gun laws were unconstitutional — and vowed to undo them in court.
A federal judge has just calmly put most of those histrionic complaints where they belong: in the dustbin of history.
When Cuomo pushed, and the state Legislature passed, a sober statute in the wake of the Newtown slaughter, it was obvious to anyone with a glancing familiarity with precedent that it would withstand legal scrutiny. Even a conservative Supreme Court had affirmed the right of states and localities to impose reasonable curbs on who can buy and wield what firearms, where and when.
New York’s law bans the possession of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requires background checks for all gun sales save those to immediate relatives, creates new controls to stop firearms from falling into the hands of the deranged and more.
Deep-pocketed NRA allies threw everything they could at it. Tuesday, federal Judge William Skretny in Buffalo — an appointee of President George H.W. Bush — knocked down the vast majority of their arguments, deeming the core of the law constitutional because it served “to further the state’s important interest in public safety.”
He struck down a provision allowing gun owners to buy 10-round magazines but preventing them from loading them with more than seven rounds at a time.
Skretny called that admittedly peculiar wrinkle in the law “arbitrary,” and also voided three other phrases — of 10 targeted by the plaintiffs — as impermissibly vague.
The language can easily be honed by the Legislature. The rest of the law, sanely, stands.
![In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1820955015.jpg?w=490 "In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]")
