In the immediate hours after at least four people were fatally shot, including an off-duty police officer, after a man carrying a long gun opened fire in Manhattan, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle began taking familiar sides in the gun control debate.
On Fox News, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) suggested that gun control laws would not help make the public safer and that the city should instead consider bringing back stop-and-frisk.
“On Capitol Hill, probably beginning in the morning, there’ll be the inevitable call by some of my colleagues for more gun control laws. We’ve got hundreds of gun control laws, maybe thousands,” Kennedy said on Sean Hannity’s show. “We don’t need more gun control, we need more idiot control.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who represents a Brooklyn district, called the shooting “tragic and horrifying” and mass shootings a “plague.”
“The gun violence epidemic continues to afflict our country and now has shattered lives in our great City. The time has come for decisive action,” he said in a statement.
The motives of the gunman, who fatally shot himself, were not immediately clear. A still of surveillance footage appears to show him carrying an assault-style rifle.
“I don’t want to hear anyone feeling sorry for this guy who did this,” Kennedy said. “I believe there’s objective evil in this world, and we saw it today.”
The Louisiana senator also floated bringing back stop-and-frisk, a policy with a controversial history of targeting communities of color in New York City.
“The other thing that, frankly, New York’s going to have to face, is the issue of whether we should bring back more aggressive stop and frisk, which is a perfectly legal law enforcement tactic,” he said.
The tactic was formally ended under the tenure of Mayor Bill de Blasio. In 2024, the city instituted a rule requiring police to disclose the race of people they stop for questioning.
