Some of the most recent violence in New York City hit close to home for the Empire State’s governor. On Monday, one of Andrew Cuomo’s lawyers, Carey Gabay, was in a crowd when probable gang members fired into the crowd, hitting Gabay in the head. According to the New York Daily News, Gabay is hospitalized, but he doesn’t have any brain activity. It was from the hospital where Cuomo gave his knee-jerk reaction by calling for more gun control. “We passed the toughest gun control law in the nation, called the SAFE Act, and I am proud of it,” Cuomo said. “Anyone who doesn’t believe we need to do something about gun control is delusional.”

Not simply satisfied with their own tough gun control laws, some New York politicians are calling for similarly strict measures nationally. The Daily News reported that New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton blamed gun laws in the South, which actually respect the Second Amendment, for NYC’s crime problems. But if you take drug and gang violence out of national murder statistics, the numbers drop nearly as low as those in European nations where guns are incredibly rare. Clearly, it’s not a gun problem. And then there’s the law of unintended consequences — if an individual doesn’t have a semiautomatic rifle with which to kill three or five people, the next step is to use a pipe bomb to kill 50. If government were to take away all guns, we would simply see other means of committing mass murder. Furthermore, gangs have festered in part because of Barack Obama’s open borders policies — something the Big Apple, which has declared itself a sanctuary city, might do well to remember.