New York mayor’s wake-up call on gun laws

We offer these remarks by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on one of last Sunday’s morning network talk and interview shows:

“You’d think that if a congresswoman got shot in the head, that would have changed Congress’ views. I can tell you how to change it: Just get Congress to come with me to the hospital when I’ve got tell somebody that their son or daughter, their spouse, their parent is not going to come home ever again.

“This past, this week, sadly, even though the murder rate in New York is so much lower than almost every big city, we still had a cop shot last week with a gun that somebody had even though the federal laws prohibited that person from having a gun.

“You know, the federal laws say you can’t get a gun if you have a drug problem, psychiatric problem, criminal record or (if you are) a minor. And yet Congress doesn’t give monies to make sure we can have a background check.

“They have too many loopholes. The background databases aren’t up to date. Private-sector sales of guns are something like 40 percent, and they don’t do background checks.

“I don’t know who has to get killed for people to start saying, ‘Wait a second, this is enough.’ We’ve had 400,000 Americans killed since RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. were both assassinated back in ’68. That is more Americans that have died on the streets from illegal guns since then in America than Americans that were killed in World War II.

“Enough is enough.”