How New York Became a Nexus of Second Amendment Infringement

By Dean Weingarten

After the American Revolutionary War, New York legislators didn’t include gun rights in their state constitution. They considered firearms freedom too obvious to include. And any legal protection redundant, thanks to the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment. And so it was — until 1911. That’s when the Empire State legislature passed the infamous Sullivan Act to protect organized crime from armed citizens . . .

“Big Tim” Sullivan created and pushed the law through the legislature. Sullivan, a crime syndicate leader, was a member of the corrupt Democratic political organization known as Tammany Hall. Sullivan’s toughs had complained about immigrants resisting their extortion efforts. Big Tim had a simple solution: make it illegal for his opposition to legally have or carry weapons. From the New York Post:

Sullivan knew the gangs would flout the law, but appearances were more important than results. Young toughs took to sewing the pockets of their coats shut, so that cops couldn’t plant firearms on them, and many gangsters stashed their weapons inside their girlfriends’ “bird cages” — wire-mesh fashion contraptions around which women would wind their hair.

Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, were disarmed, which solved another problem: …Read the Rest

Source:: Truth About Guns