New York City- Anoth­er Day, Anoth­er Mur­der

This morn­ing (12/04/24) I read that Unit­ed Health­care CEO Bri­an Thomp­son had been shot and killed while stand­ing out­side the New York Hilton Mid­town hotel. New York City’s police com­mis­sion­er stat­ed that it was a, “brazen, tar­get­ed attack”.  He was one of the lat­est vic­tims of anoth­er mur­der in the city.

Mur­der in gun-con­trolled New York City

My ini­tial thought was the report couldn’t pos­si­bly be true because the Sul­li­van Act, passed in 1911, has essen­tial­ly made it ille­gal to have a hand­gun in New York City. Sure­ly, with hand­gun pos­ses­sion being ille­gal (except for for­mer police offi­cers and any­one with con­nec­tions) for over 100 years, no hand­gun crimes are com­mit­ted with­in city’s five bor­oughs.

Although gun con­trol advo­cates would have you believe such a fairy tale, the real­i­ty, as demon­strat­ed again by this morning’s shoot­ing, is that gun con­trol is inef­fec­tive at con­trol­ling crime. Its sole func­tion is to make it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for law abid­ing cit­i­zens to own guns.

Although many gun con­trol laws were cre­at­ed by mis­guid­ed do-good­ers, oth­ers have a more devi­ous ori­gin. The ulti­mate irony of the Sul­li­van Act is that it was cre­at­ed to pro­tect crim­i­nals, not law-abid­ing cit­i­zens. Dur­ing the wan­ing years of the 19^th cen­tu­ry. Irish immi­grants and first-gen­er­a­tion Irish Amer­i­cans large­ly con­trolled “Tam­many Hall”, head­quar­ters of the city’s cor­rupt Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty.

Like many of his Tam­many Hall col­leagues, Tim Sul­li­van turned to pol­i­tics as a means of expand­ing the scope of his ille­gal activ­i­ties. Con­cur­rent with Sullivan’s rise to pow­er, a wave of Ital­ian immi­grants, many of whom brought Mafia con­nec­tions with them, flood­ed the city. Eth­nic diver­si­ty being unheard of at the time, the reign­ing Irish/American crim­i­nals saw new­ly arrived Mafia types as com­pe­ti­tion, and the aver­age Ital­ian immi­grant as s wel­comed their new­ly arrived Ital­ian coun­ter­parts into the fold. Instead, they saw the Mafia types as com­pe­ti­tion and the immi­grant pop­u­la­tion as a field of vic­tims as an addi­tion­al source of poten­tial vic­tims.

The advent of Ital­ian immi­grants with guns seri­ous­ly altered New York City’s crim­i­nal land­scape. Instead of being able to run their ille­gal oper­a­tions with­out chal­lenge, Sul­li­van and his cronies had to con­front the fact that an ardu­ous day of rack­e­teer­ing would like­ly be inter­rupt­ed by Ital­ian com­pe­ti­tion or poten­tial vic­tims pulling guns to defend them­selves.

Sul­li­van became a state sen­a­tor and pushed through the Sul­li­van Act, a law that required gun own­ers to have per­mits while empow­er­ing local author­i­ties to issue or deny gun own­er­ship per­mits at their own dis­cre­tion Although the law is applic­a­ble through­out the state, New York City has applied it in its most restric­tive form.

Mur­der despite gun laws

To lit­tle effect. Crim­i­nals have his­tor­i­cal­ly ignored the Sul­li­van Act (sur­prise) and con­tin­ue to do so. Accord­ing to New York Police Depart­ment sta­tis­tics, through the first 48 weeks of 2024, NYC has had 1,026 shoot­ing vic­tims. That com­pares to 1,063 for the same peri­od in 2023. Dur­ing that same 2024 time frame, there were 1,601 rapes, 15,241 rob­beries, 27,174 felony assaults,11,912 bur­glar­ies and 44,855 cas­es of grand lar­ce­nies. Sta­tis­tics don’t list the num­ber of times guns were present but not fired dur­ing the com­mis­sion of var­i­ous crimes. But it’s rea­son­able to assume that guns were used to intim­i­date vic­tims dur­ing a high per­cent­age of most crimes; crim­i­nals always have guns and gun con­trol laws do not change that.

New York City isn’t unique as a city with strict gun laws and high crime rates. Dur­ing the first 48 weeks of 2024, Chica­go Police Depart­ment sta­tis­tics list 2,161 shoot­ing inci­dents and 533 mur­ders. Yet when you dig into crime data, oppres­sive gun con­trol laws or the lack there­of have noth­ing to do with the amount of gun-relat­ed crime com­mit­ted in urban areas. That’s because crime is a cul­tur­al issue, not a gun con­trol issue.

Even in cities that make the top 10 list for high crime rates, the entire city isn’t a killing field. That dis­tinc­tion is earned only by indi­vid­ual neigh­bor­hoods. Accord­ing to data com­piled by the Prop­er­ty Club, “On aver­age, Chica­go is about 67% more dan­ger­ous than the US aver­age. Both vio­lent and prop­er­ty crimes are a prob­lem in the city, with a high inci­dence of gun vio­lence.” Yet the high rate of vio­lent crime occurs in only 12 of Chicago’s 178 offi­cial neigh­bor­hoods.

Sim­i­lar­ly in New York City with 339 offi­cial neigh­bor­hoods, The Prop­er­ty Club has labeled Hunts Point in the Bronx (where your chances of being a vic­tim are 1 in 22) as the most dan­ger­ous neigh­bor­hood in the city and iden­ti­fied 11 oth­er neigh­bor­hoods where crime rates are expo­nen­tial­ly high­er than in oth­er parts of the city.

Anoth­er day, anoth­er mur­der

The mur­der of Bri­an Thomp­son will ulti­mate­ly be added to the city’s crime data­base, but it will stand apart from the oth­er mur­ders list­ed in the 2024 data­base. It wasn’t com­mit­ted in a high crime area nor was it ran­dom. But this mur­der does have one thing in com­mon with those com­mit­ted in the city’s high crime neigh­bor­hoods. It was not pre­vent­ed by a gun con­trol ordi­nance that has been on the books for over 100 years.

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This arti­cle was cross post­ed with Dave’s Sub­stack.

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