Community and School Safety

The City of Dunkirk Police were concerned. A person tried to enter the City Court with weapons and threatened the officers and judge. This same person was believed to have a firearm at their residence.

The police were concerned enough about the public’s safety that they used the State’s “Red Flag” law to get a court order allowing them to remove the person’s firearm from the home. The court order also prevented the person from purchasing additional firearms.

New York adopted its first Red Flag law in 2019. The purpose of a Red Flag law is to protect the community from gun violence when a person is shown to be a threat to their own safety or the safety of others. The law allows a court to determine a person poses a threat and remove guns in their possession and prevent a person from purchasing guns.

New York’s Red Flag law was strengthened in 2022 after it was discovered that Payton Gendron, who massacred ten Black residents at the Tops Market in Buffalo in 2021, had been hospitalized for threatening behavior the prior year. But, because the law then did not require applying the Red Flag law, Gendron was not petitioned to court and prevented from purchasing the lethal weapons used to gun down our neighbors.

With the changes to the law in 2022, it has been applied more rigorously. Petitions may be brought against persons by police officers and other officials, or by family members and school personnel. There have been more than 100 petitions brought in our Assembly District, most notably since the law was strengthened, offering valuable protections to the community as well as to individuals who might otherwise harm themselves with a firearm.

It is this sort of legislation that Mike Bobseine supports. Our police officers and school personnel need to know how to use the Red Flag law and should be supported in the process to ensure that we maximize the law’s appropriate use and protect our community, especially children in our schools. No one should have to experience the horror of a school shooting, like the one that occurred just last week in Georgia with two 14-year old students and two teachers killed.

At the same time, Mike supports people's 2nd Amendment right to own and use firearms. After all, Assembly District 150 is a hunting and sporting community, and the vast majority of people use guns legally and responsibly.

No one running for this Assembly district wants to take people's guns. Mike says, however, that “schools and guns scare me”. The gun violence in our country makes me scared for my grandkids, and your child, and your grandchild. People should be able to keep their guns; but kept safe and away from kids and people who shouldn't have them.”

If we come together over our common values — honoring our constitutional rights, acting responsibly, and protecting the vulnerable — we can develop common sense solutions to the incidences of gun violence, which, in one case, struck so near to us with the massacre of 10 innocent people in a racist attack at a TOPs Supermarket in Buffalo.

In the end, a healthy community is a safe community. 

A healthy community is one where we protect our children, elderly, and families against illegal guns and drugs, as well as dangerous people, and we adequately fund law enforcement.