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No Guns for Minority Men

Former New York Mayor Has Unconstitutional Goals in Sight

By News

Former New York City Mayor MichaeBloomberg has come under fire in response to his suggestion that young minority men should not be allowed to possess firearms in New York City.

During a speech Bloomberg gavat the Aspen Institute on February 5, moderator Jennifer Bradley asked him what the government could do for kids who have been failed.Despite indicating that access to education remains a problem, Bloomberg chose to focus on minoritgun ownership instead.

Bloombergs response was that Cities need to get guns out of [the] … handsof people who are “male, minority, and between the ages of 15 and 25,” a proposition he based on his own contrived statistic that 95 percent of murders in the United States involved a minority male between the ages of 15 and 25.

According to the Daily Callers audio recording of Bloombergs comments, he said, You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. Thats true in New York, its true in virtually every city in America.

Bloomberg, a major funder of the guncontrol advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, suggested legislation to keep guns out of the hands of young minority me— but not their white counterparts.

One of the unintended consequences is people say, Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana. Theyre all minorities,Bloomberg said. Yes, thattrue. Why? Because we put all the cops ithe minority neighborhoods. Yes, thats true. Why do you do it? Because thats where all the crime is.

The bipartisan reaction included former Secretary of State for New York Randy A. Daniels, a Republican who  worked in Albany during George Patakis term as governor of New York. He said, Those statements are discriminatory and unconstitutional. You cant restrict guns, or anything really, on the basis of race. It also doesnt really address the problem.This was not the first time Bloombergs stances have been called unconstitutional.

In Bloombergs 12 years as mayor of the most unequal city in the U.S. bincome, he was a zealous advocate for the New York Police Departments (NYPD) stopand-frisk program.

Daniels is not the only New York politician to respond, however. I expect nothing less from a mayor whose stop-and-frisk policy is now the subject of a federal monitor,said a senior officiaof the New York State government who wished to remain nameless. The statistics are staggering. Sadly, he believes the ends justify the means. [To him] the systemic violation of this communitys 4th amendment rights is an acceptable price to pay for crime reduction. A price no other community is required to pay or tolerate.”

Following a more than twomonth nonjury trial, Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin deemed the practice a systematically racist and unconstitutional policing strategy in August of 2014, adding that the plaintiffs who had instigated thcase “readily established that the NYPimplements its policies regarding stop- and-frisk in a manner that intentionally discriminates based on race. (Chicago police use their stopand-frisk program more than four times as often, according to a recent American Civil Liberties Union report.)

The Aspen Times reported that Bloomberg successfully blocked video footage from his talk at the AspeInstitute from being posted online. As of Thursday, February 13, both the Aspen Institute and GrassRoots TV, the broadcast media organization that filmed Bloombergs speech, confirmed that they had agreed to withhold the footage from both online and television.

Daniels acknowledged Bloombergs motive behind the censorship. He said, Its understandable that people would have second thoughts about a position that is so clearly illegal.

The senior government official echoed Daniels sentiment about

Bloomberg, saying, “He makes claims that are factually incorrect and assumptions that have no correlation with reality and provides no rational legal basis for the discriminatory policy that he believes should be implemented upon a protected class ocitizens of color.

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