Grandstanding today at City Hall, Byron Brown will ignore gun control’s spectacular failure across Buffalo while pandering to Bloomberg-backed interest groups

June 7, 2019 – BUFFALO, N.Y. – According to Brady Campaign and Everytown-aligned New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (NYAGV), Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown is scheduled to hold a press conference today at City Hall for so-called ‘Gun Violence Awareness Weekend.’ In addition, Brown has apparently authorized City Hall and other downtown buildings to be illuminated orange for the weekend as part of today’s disinformation initiative.

“When Brown speaks today at City Hall, his entire collection of comments will amount to the usual exercise in deception and virtue signaling that we’ve come to expect from the Michael Bloomberg-aligned interest groups comprising the nation’s civilian disarmament industrial complex,” 2AWNY.COM Civil Rights Advocate Steve Felano said. “Brown and NYAGV have no real interest in reducing so-called ‘gun violence,’ because the relevant data makes it plainly obvious to them that the type of highly-restrictive gun control schemes active in Buffalo and statewide have not delivered their advertised results.”

Speaking today, Mayor Brown will completely ignore the fact that the New York State SAFE Act and the remainder of the state’s highly draconian gun control regime have done absolutely zero to reduce so-called gun violence in Buffalo. If fact, said regime has produced the exact opposite effect, significantly increasing the volume of homicides in the city. Indeed, the Buffalo News has reported that more people were killed in Buffalo in 2018 than in each of the prior three years. Will we hear about this today from Mayor Brown? Of course not. When confronted with this inconvenient truth, Brown will simply take a page out to the far-left progressive playbook and advocate for more of the same unconstitutional gun control policies that have already been tried but continue to fail at every level.

Furthermore, the most contemporary data analysis clearly shows that the type of highly restrictive gun control in place in New York State and Buffalo, closely mirroring that of communist China and socialist Venezuela, and centering on magazine capacity limits and bans on so-called ‘assault weapons,’ is not consistently related to overall homicide or suicide rates. For Brown and NYAGV, today’s press conference is really about willfully deceiving the public via emotional manipulation in service of further mass liberty reduction via ineffective gun control.

Today’s public disinformation event at City Hall notwithstanding, and despite the best efforts of progressive hoplophobes like Byron Brown and those supporting NYAGV, New York State’s gun control scheme is on track to be dismantled in the courts throughout 2020. 2AWNY.COM has already successfully reversed the first ever SAFE Act conviction this year in New York State Supreme Court. Next, the SAFE Act will be overturned on constitutional grounds soon after the landmark case NYSRPA v. NYC is decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is highly likely to result in strict scrutiny being installed as the required legal standard for assessing Second Amendment cases. Following this, 2AWNY.COM will leverage this standard to dismantle the state’s unconstitutional pistol permitting regime via the case Libertarian Party of Erie County v. Cuomo, which was persuasively argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in February 2019. The remainder of New York State’s onerous gun control program will likewise be repealed via this method, as none of its various anti-liberty components are capable of withstanding the rigors of strict scrutiny in the courts. As all this occurs, significant components of the SAFE Act will continue to go without enforcement, as evidenced by the fact that all 17 Western New York counties comprise a SAFE Act Seven-Round Limit Non-Enforcement Zone.

Finally, Mayor Brown and NYAGV’s progressive acolytes have failed to take notice that today is not ‘Gun Violence Awareness Day’ and June is not ‘Gun Violence Awareness Month.’ As noted during 2AWNY.COM’s May 31 press conference in Genesee County, today is National Gun Control Victims Awareness Day, and June is National Gun Control Victims Awareness Month.

2AWNY.COM laid a yellow wreath last week in front of Genesee County Building One to remember the millions of global deaths that have occurred as a direct result of tyrannical gun control policies. This remembrance ceremony was a precursor to National Gun Control Victims Awareness Month, which spans the entirety of June 2019.

Yellow is the official color of National Gun Control Victims Awareness Month because it symbolizes the mind, intellect, and logic. These are faculties possessed by those who recognize, via empirical data, that gun control is an illogical, emotion-based security deception for grown adults that does nothing to reduce ‘gun violence.’

The May 31 event honored the more than 169 million victims who died as a result of 20th century government tyranny, the more than one million Uyghur Muslims unlawfully imprisoned as a direct result of China’s gun control policies, and at least 250 unarmed civilians killed between 2014 and today as a direct result of Venezuela’s gun control policies. New York State’s gun control policies are ideological twins of those in China and Venezuela, and leave New Yorkers exposed to the same type of lethal government tyranny experienced in both nations.

In an era when uninformed progressive mobs mindlessly clamor for endless restrictions on the natural right to keep and bear arms, the lessons of the present and past centuries require a painstaking reexamination. Government tyranny, almost always bolstered by onerous gun control imperial edicts, generated 169,202,000 human deaths in the 20th century alone. This terrible legacy has carried over into the 21st century. At least one million Uyghur Muslims are being held by their government in modern concentration camps as a direct result of China’s 1996 Firearms-Control Law. At least 250 unarmed civilians have been killed by their government over the last five years as a direct result of Venezuela’s Act on the Disarmament and Control of Arms and Ammunition of 2013.

Despite history’s repeated lessons that gun control violates the natural rights of all persons and inevitably results in millions of government-caused deaths, New York State continues to be a leader when it comes to exacerbating the damage caused by America’s failed gun control experiment. Today, and throughout the month of June, 2AWNY.COM remembers the victims of this failed experiment, and once again calls for an end to this emotion-driven infringement on our Second Amendment civil rights.

To learn more about any of the above, please contact Steve Felano at (518) 852-1863 or [email protected].

– 30 –

2AWNY is a force multiplier for the numerous Second Amendment civil rights advocacy enterprises forming the backbone of Western New York’s vibrant gun culture. We act as a 2A news and information distribution, policy analysis, and organizational driver for the many interest groups seeking to defend and expand Second Amendment civil rights throughout the region. 2AWNY is dedicated to assisting in the organization, promotion, and funding of legal challenges to the unconstitutional New York State gun control regime. We seek to make Western New York the epicenter of New York State’s Second Amendment civil rights renaissance. Learn more at WWW.2AWNY.COM.