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Feds Not Sure About Mayor's War on Illegal Guns
By
Jen Chung
Published Feb 9, 2007
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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By
Jen Chung
Published Feb 9, 2007
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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One of Mayor Bloomberg's biggest initiatives is to stop gun dealers from illegally selling guns that make their way to New York City. Last May, the city filed its first federal lawsuit against out-of-state gun dealers, after conducting sting purchases where one individual would purchase a gun for someone else. Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced that the gun dealers would not face criminal prosecution because the investigators conducting the stings may have acted illegally.
Legal experts, though, tell the NY Sun that they expect the lawsuits to go forward. The City is more interested in the civil cases: The city's criminal justice coordinator said, "Our goal was to make dealers play by the rules, not to put them in jail, not to drive them out of business." And Timothy Lytton, law professor at Albany Law School, says, "More what it shows is there is a continuing lack of zeal by the federal government to investigate and enforce these laws at a dealer level. New York has taken it upon itself to enforce federal laws by suing for this kind of nuisance in the face of the federal government, who has decided not to enforce these laws."
Here is the website for Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the coalition formed by Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston. And Mayor Bloomberg has been aggressive about creating new gun legislation.
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Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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