Westchester County Legislature
passes bill on 'safe storage'

Safe for the burglers, that is...

Westchester County passed two new laws yesterday to 'make a statement' about gun violence. One requires all gun owners to lock their guns (either in a safe, or a closet, or with a trigger lock) when they are not with them--even if the gun is in a locked house. This means that gun owners must either lock and unlock the gun twice a day, or else be fumbling for the keys if an intruder actually did break into their house. Robbers will love this legislation.

The second piece of legislation was to ban toy guns that either look substantially like real guns, or are colored blue, black, silver, aluminum (per NYS law), or brown or green (added by the Westchester law). County legislator James Maisano asked for its passage with a heart-tugging hypothetical scenario of a cop on Christmas Eve (whose child's birthday is also the next day) running into a figure in the shadows while alone on duty, and not even realizing it's a child, nevermind that the gun s/he holds is only a toy. When asked "If you can't see if it's a child or an adult, how are you going to see what color the gun is?" In his answer, Maisano apparently got confused about his own piece of legislation, thinking that color and shape differences were required on toy guns, when in reality, it's only one or the other (plus a barrel plug and stamp, also pretty hard to see in circumstances like the one he described).