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More on Giuliani on Gun Control

GOA's John Velleco provides a history of Rudy's gun control fetish:

In 1993, Giuliani met with then-President Clinton to discuss national gun registration and supported the Brady bill, which had recently passed, but Rudy argued that it didn’t go far enough. Clinton, largely crediting Giuliani for the idea, enthusiastically sent Atty. Gen. Janet Reno off to develop a gun-licensing and registration system.

In May 1994, as the battle over the ban on certain semi-automatic firearms reached its height, Giuliani threw his support behind the ban. On the eve of the final vote, he noted that so-called assault weapons “have no legitimate purpose.” When the ban passed, Giuliani commented that “this is an important step toward curtailing the indiscriminate proliferation of guns across the nation.”

When a lunatic attacked innocent civilians at the Empire State Building in 1997, Giuliani used the tragedy to again push for gun control beyond his city’s limits: “We need a federal law that bans all assault weapons, and if in fact you do need a handgun, you should be subjected to at least the same restrictions—and really stronger ones—that exist for driving an automobile. ... Congress needs to pass uniform licensing for everyone carrying a gun.”

When Rudy did focus on city gun laws, which already were among the most stringent in the country, his effort was only to further disarm the law-abiding.

In 1998, Giuliani pushed a proposal that would require gun owners to use “trigger locks” on all firearms, thus rendering the guns useless in the event of an emergency. Such a law would be enforced, he said, through “criminal penalties and the revocation of gun permits.”

If Giuliani had a federalist conversion, it did not occur in his first six years as mayor, for in 2000, he again took his gun-control show on the road.

In becoming the first GOP mayor to launch a city lawsuit against gun makers, Giuliani complained that “less restrictive gun laws in other parts of the country” exacerbated the crime problem in New York City.