For LaFayette gun shop owner Tony Steiner, the new state gun law is a threat to his business.
“The rules and regulations are going to dramatically affect my business in a negative way,” said Steiner, co-owner of AKS Firearms. “Seventy-five percent of the firearms we used to be able to sell are now banned.”
Steiner is among the critics of the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act — also called the SAFE Act — passed by New York legislature and signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Jan. 15. The law imposes tougher requirements for background checks on gun buyers, bans more assault-style weapons and adds new restrictions to online purchasing. This law is provoking an escalating backlash among firearm traders in New York state.
Critics say the law bans too many weapons, was passed too quickly without enough public debate and won’t stop gun violence.
Among the weapon-bans in the law is a new definition of high-capacity magazines for ammunition. Under the new definition, a high-capacity magazine can hold only seven rounds of ammunition instead of the 10 rounds that had been allowed. A large number of firearms are still built with ten-round magazines and now many shotguns and rifles are on the list of assault weapons, say critics.
That includes “basically all the common firearms out there — all rifles, pistols and shotguns,” said Jacob J. Rieper, vice president of legislative and political affairs at the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association. Owning those weapons, he said, is now illegal.
“The law,” said Reiper, “has turned somewhere between five to ten million people in the state into criminals.”
The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association says it will sue New York state over the law. The association will lobby state lawmakers in Albany on Feb.28.
Rieper and other critics argue that the act violates both the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms and the law that requires the government to compensate citizens when their property is taken by the government. Gun shop owners also complain that the law makes staying in business and making profits more difficult.
Craig Hare, owner of Butternut Creek Armory in Jamesville, said some of his fellow gun traders were planning to leave New York for less-regulated states like Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina. “I’ve already heard people wanted to pack up and get out of here because these rules are ridiculous,” said Hare.
The state’s rapid action on the law has also provoked outrage among gun shop owners. “They should have done it the correct way, the democratic way, instead of the governor just decides he is going make a decision and passing it overnight without checking with everyone,” said Timothy Nelson, co-owner of the Intimidator Sports in Nedrow.
Since the law was approved, the job-approval rating of Cuomo has declined from 74 percent to 50 percent in January, according to a survey conducted by Quinnipiac University.
Many gun shop owners doubt the law will effectively reduce gun violence. Some call for more help for the mentally ill, who have sometimes been in high-profile cases of gun violence such as the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting or the Newtown, Conn., elementary school shooting.
Don Stroup, president of Pompey Rod and Gun Club in Fabius, said it is more important to “give people some psychological help” than to ban the kinds of weapons gunmen in those atrocious shootings were using.
Even some gun control supporters, like Peter Bell, a law professor at Syracuse University and a supporter of gun control, doubt the law will easily achieve its goals. Bell said unless a comprehensive federal law was implemented, state gun control would do little to prevent gun violence since people could always buy weapons from another state.
“Right now my biggest concern is the backlash by the gun owners,” said Bell “It will scare other politicians around of doing anything of any significance to change gun law to make it safer for people.”
Others, like Steiner of AKS Firearms in LaFayette, argue that the new laws put unnecessary restrictions on law-abiding citizens. “They are not the ones that are causing a problem. It is the bad people that do bad things with the tools that create a problem,” said Steiner.
In January, the AKS Firearm store in LaFayette has sold more guns in one month than within three months in 2012, according to Steiner, because customers were afraid they couldn’t easily get guns in the future.
“Something you had legal for years, all of a sudden you can’t have it anymore. You can’t pass it on to your family or own it,” said Steiner. “That’s just not the American way.”
(Maya Gao Qian is a graduate student in magazine, newspaper and online journalism.)
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