President Joe Biden touted his plans for cracking down on so-called “ghost guns” during a visit to New York City on Thursday – but he stopped short of addressing how to get those firearms already on the streets out of the hands of violent criminals.
Biden insisted the answer to surging gun violence was “not to defund the police” or “abandon our streets” as he met with Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul at the NYPD’s Manhattan headquarters.
In a series of rhetoric-laden speeches, Biden – as well as Adams and Hochul – lauded the federal government’s new initiatives to crack down on illegal ghost guns and firearms trafficking along the East Coast “iron pipeline” that are ending up in the Empire State.
But the plan does nothing to immediately get guns off the streets amid the recent surge in shootings across New York City, critics told The Post.
“Typical political mumbo-jumbo. They talk a good game, but they don’t help,” a Brooklyn NYPD detective told The Post. “The guns are already here. We have to keep the people that we arrest with guns in jail. That is the only hope for innocent victims that get shot.”
Among the slew of measures the Biden administration announced earlier Thursday was the Justice Department’s new National Ghost Gun Enforcement Initiative, which aims to clamp down on homemade firearms that lack serial numbers used to trace them.
