The foolishness, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and elitism of the gun-control crusade are summed up in one incredible story from Albany Times Union, which reports that gun-grabbing Governor Andrew Cuomo arranged for a special imperial waiver from the law for Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner Jerome Hauer, exempting him from the law that bans state employees from bringing guns into the workplace.
Cuomo defended Hauer at a news conference Wednesday. The governor said he's comfortable with commissioners carrying weapons to work as long as they have gun permits. He qualified the response by adding "if they are licensed and in that field of work."
Hauer is not a law enforcement officer or working in law enforcement, although his official vehicle has emergency lights and sirens.
Despite the lack of a waiver before January, several witnesses said he has been carrying a gun on the job since Cuomo appointed him in 2011.
People have seen Hauer with his gun on him in state buildings, including 633 Third Ave. in Manhattan, where the governor has offices, and at division headquarters at the Harriman campus in Albany.
In other words, gun-grabber extraordinaire Andrew Cuomo - whose hunger to disarm law-abiding citizens is so intense that he pushed through an idiotic law without reading it, technically disarming the police until hasty revisions were made - doesn't care that his buddy was breaking the law before now. Your Democrat Party: working tirelessly to bring Venezuelan government standards to America.
And what has Mr. Hauer been up to with his illegal firearm? Oh, he's just been using it as a laser pointer during meetings, causing his audience to duck for cover as he waved his firearm around like Homer Simpson:
[Hauer] took out his handgun and used the laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer in a presentation to a foreign delegation, according to public officials. It happened Oct. 24 in Albany at the highly secure state emergency operations center below State Police headquarters.
These officials, one of whom claimed to be an eyewitness, said that three Swedish emergency managers in the delegation were rattled when the gun's laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York, at which he wanted to point.
[...] According to one person who witnessed the scene in the conference room, which has mid-wall-to-ceiling windows so that people can see into the meeting space, two people opposite Hauer at the table moved quickly out of the line of the laser when he brought out the gun.
Well, at least you can't accuse him of holding boring meetings.
A person in state government familiar with State Facilities Law said Hauer received a waiver from Office of General Services Commissioner RoAnn Destito on Jan. 10. She and State Police Superintendent Joseph D'Amico are the only people authorized to grant such waivers. The person said D'Amico declined to provide a waiver for Hauer.
D'Amico declined an interview request, and his spokesperson would not answer questions.
Nor will they produce the waiver, whose existence we are expected to take on faith. Maybe they were afraid someone would smear the still-damp ink by handling the freshly printed document, which squirted out of the bureaucracy after complaints about Hauer waving his hardware around at meetings were leaked to the media:
The waiver arrived hastily, late on a Friday preceding the publication of a follow-up story about Hauer's use of the gun in front of the Swedish delegation, according to the person familiar with the waiver process. It was granted after numerous inquiries from the Times Union about Hauer's authorization to carry a gun.
This all calls to mind an observation about California gun laws, made in the wake of the Ninth Circuit's bombshell declaration that the Second Amendment means what it says: the laws in these blue states tend to be administered in a way that grants protection to political elites, while leaving everyone else disarmed and helpless before predators. If you're a top member of the Ruling Class, you have armed guards; if you've got the right political connections, you can get a gun permit; everyone else is told to make do without access to the weapons our elites are unwilling to surrender.
