Ben Connor, '25 Winter 2024

PDF available with citations and footnotes here

Gun violence in New York City has been a focal point since the 1990s. Starting with the campaign and subsequent election of Rudy Giuliani, tough on crime messaging put gun violence on center stage. That focus has remained, creating a 30-year-long campaign of varying strategies to tackle gun violence, including severely limiting access to legal guns and eagerly seizing illegal ones. Different administrations have taken a wide variety of approaches, but overall, change since the 1990s indicates that they have been relatively successful in this task, driving down gun violence in New York City dramatically over time. 

However, New York City has not pursued these policies in a vacuum. Other governmental actors ranging from the federal judiciary to the legislatures of neighboring states have heavily impacted the degree to which New York City can control gun violence. This paper investigates these relationships, revealing how external structures of government influence gun violence in New York City from 1994 to the present. In doing so, this paper adds to the literature on New York City gun violence and provides a descriptive account of city power by demonstrating the boundaries of what a city can do to address problems like gun violence. It also adds to the literature on federalism, which, for the purposes of this paper, refers to the system of governance in the United States whereby power is distributed between an overarching federal government and several smaller and distinct state governments, as well as the system by which those state governments distribute political power to local governments like cities and towns. In the United States, federalism is generally perceived to be the system of dual sovereignty whereby states and the national government share power. This paper, however, will focus on an expansion of that limited definition by highlighting the role of the city in this system. There are three planes of interest which this paper focuses on: interstate, intrastate, and nation-city interactions. Gun violence provides a valuable case study for these three, all of which have been overlooked historically in traditional understandings of federalism in the United States. 

New York City Gun Violence: 1994-2023

To understand gun violence in New York City, it is helpful to first look at the data. Gun violence in New York City has experienced a sustained and dramatic decrease in the last three decades. According to data gathered using NYPD’s CompStat 2.0, there were 4411 shooting incidents in 1994. By 2000 this number had dropped to 1794, a nearly 60% decrease over the course of the Guliani administration. This trend continued through the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, falling to 1103 shooting incidents by 2013, a 38% drop from 2000 numbers, and then to 777 shooting incidents by 2019, a 30% drop from 2013. This trend, like most crime trends, was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020, and featured 1541 shooting incidents in 2020. Since then, however, gun violence has reduced to more normal levels, with 895 shootings in 2023 as of November 26th. This broad trend occurred while the population of New York City increased from 7.3 million in 1990 to 8.8 million in 2020, representing a substantial drop in per capita gun incidents from 26.4 per 100,000 people in 1994 to just 4.7 per 100,000 people in 2023. Despite this staggering drop in gun violence, gun violence is understandably still a concern for people and as such receives a lot of city attention. 

The New York City government has targeted gun violence aggressively since Giuliani ran his “law-and-order” campaign for mayor in 1993. The city deployed more detectives to crack down on gun trafficking and new computers to look up serial numbers of captured weapons, not to mention efforts to seize more illegal guns through the embrace of strategies like community policing and stop and frisk. This focus on gun violence has persisted to the present day in city government and in community organizations, even if the specific strategies have changed. Bloomberg largely embraced stop and frisk as a method to stop gun violence and crime, de Blasio had Safe Summer NYC which took a more rehabilitative approach to gun violence, and Adams has embraced increased funding for community engagement initiatives and enhanced services for those who get involved with the justice system as well as hiring a gun czar to combat gun violence, Andre Mitchell. Mitchell is also the executive director of the gun violence prevention nonprofit Man Up Inc. This is one of dozens of nonprofits that exist to combat gun violence in New York City, and is joined by groups like New Yorkers Against Gun Violence and Save Our Streets. In short, New Yorkers care an immense amount about gun violence and the city government has responded to this fact. This makes gun violence an excellent case study for federalism — it receives an immense amount of attention, leading to visible conflict between New York City and other governments.

Interstate Factors

Traditional conceptions of federalism tend to focus on the vertical relationship between the national government and the states, both in terms of state-federal friction and in terms of cooperation. This has left the field of horizontal federalism, or interaction between states, under-analyzed. Law review articles like “Horizontal Federalism” by Allan Erbsen in 2008 have taken important steps in creating the theoretical backing for this field, and this paper will provide real world evidence of antagonistic interstate interactions. Further, the literature that does exist focuses on state-to-state interaction, but the size, influence, and behavior of New York City is such that there is evidence of state-city interactions where the city is outside of the given state. Gun violence policy is particularly illustrative of this phenomenon because the gun regulations imposed by one state, or lack thereof, impact the surrounding states in the form of gun trafficking. Some of these impacts are merely spillovers — permissive gun laws undermining gun laws in other states. These kinds of spillovers have been discussed by academics like Heather Gerken and Ari Holtzblatt. However, other interactions are far more deliberate, featuring New York City attempting to enforce federal gun laws outside of New York State, creating tension between these levels of government. The impact of interactions of this kind are substantial and assist in revealing the distribution of power between states and cities outside of their control.

Gun violence data in New York City also reveals the staggering impact of gun trafficking. Between 2010 and 2015, 87% of all guns collected by the NYPD came from out of state. These guns are coming from seven states along the so-called “iron pipeline.” 80% of likely trafficked guns in New York City came from one of these seven states: 19% from Virginia, 13% from Pennsylvania, 13% from South Carolina, 13% from Georgia, 10% from North Carolina, 7% from Florida, and 5% from Ohio.

There is a reason guns are coming from these states and not places like New Jersey or Connecticut: weak gun laws. Nationwide, illegal firearms tend to flow from states with weaker gun laws to states with stronger gun laws, highlighting the spillover effect of weak gun laws. This is the product of both weak consumer regulation and weak distributor regulation. Consumer regulation in the form of universal background checks and gun violence restraining orders are associated with reduced gun trafficking while strong distributor regulation in the form of state inspections, record keeping, and mandated reporting of theft or loss has been associated with 64% fewer guns being diverted to criminals by dealers from within the state.

Despite the fact that guns are stolen at higher rates in states with weaker gun laws, stolen guns seem to be a relatively small component of trafficked guns. Instead, according to a mixed methods analysis of the Bronx and Brooklyn, the two boroughs where gun violence and crime gun recoveries are most prevalent, guns overwhelmingly come from “high-volume gun brokers, middlemen, and individuals who make episodic low-level acquisitions from straw purchasers in other states.” 85.1% of study participants reported that their weapons came from I-95 Southern States, but varied in how specifically they got them, indicating the fragmented nature of the gun trafficking market. Many smugglers run small operations, with residents living in New York City making one or two trips South to load up on handguns and sell them back home. The multichannel nature of the illegal gun market implies that attempting to crack down on those transporting guns is difficult and will not entirely stem the flow, limiting the ability of New York City to eliminate gun access through operations targeting gun trafficking rings alone.

Cracking down on gun trafficking has been a substantial focus of New York City politicians since Guliani. In response to the prevalence of out-of-state guns gaining more attention, Guliani directed detectives to focus more on gun runners and assist federal authorities in arresting interstate gun runners. Bloomberg took an even more direct and aggressive approach. He founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns, though this did little to sway state legislatures that preempted other city’s attempts to impose gun control. Unable to change the laws in other states, Bloomberg turned to enforcing federal law in states that were not doing so. In 2006, New York City hired investigators to make straw purchases in five states — Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. Straw purchases are a “violation of federal law and include gun transactions in which one individual submits information for the required background check for a gun that is clearly meant to be used by someone else.” Ultimately, 27 shops, sales from which had previously been linked to crimes committed in New York City, were sued for allowing straw purchases to occur by the Bloomberg administration, which sought monetary damages and control over future sales. 15 of these shops settled with the city, while 12 went to court. Several of these shops launched a countersuit against the city, alleging that the city broke the law by conducting these sting operations out of state, which they ultimately lost. The Bloomberg administration conducted more sting operations at gun shows in 2009, which yielded similarly fruitful results. This news was largely met with outrage where the stings occurred, with the Attorney General from Virginia proposing legislation that would outlaw tactics like the simulated straw purchases Bloomberg conducted, though this ultimately went nowhere. The success and relative ease of these gun stings demonstrates how loose regulations are exacerbated by a lack of desire by states to enforce the laws that do exist. Research on these stings indicates that they were successful. Using a sample size of roughly 6000 guns sold before the lawsuit by the gun distributors and 6000 guns sold after the lawsuit, researchers found that the NYPD recovered 84.2% fewer of these guns from the distributors.

Mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams have had far fewer conflicts with other state governments over gun trafficking. Mayor de Blasio focused largely on increasing prosecution and investigation of gun traffickers, while Adams has asked the state to conduct checks of vehicles and people entering the city, which has not happened.

Interstate conflict is unlikely to abate in the near future. Partisan hostility and antagonism have grown in recent years, making cooperation between Democrat and Republican politicians politically difficult. While the National Rifle Association has been substantially weakened in recent years due to infighting, lawsuits, and bankruptcy, this has only opened the floor for more extreme gun advocacy groups to take their place. Despite this, some states have shown a willingness to work with New York in combating gun violence. As part of the Interstate Task Force on Illegal Guns conveyed by Governor Hochul, the NYPD, New York State Police, ATF, and representatives from dozens of other law enforcement organizations met to “share intelligence, tools, tactics, and strategies to combat gun violence, especially as it relates to the trafficking of firearms between states.” However, of the seven top states that traffic guns into New York, only Pennsylvania and Ohio participated. 

Overall, the spillovers from other states’ weak gun laws combined with states’ lack of willingness to enforce the gun laws that do exist curbs New York City’s ability to prevent gun violence. Notably, this case study also features explicit power interaction between a state and a city outside of its borders, which traditional federalism does not consider.

Intrastate Factors

Under the Constitution of the United States, cities receive no explicit mention. This fact means that cities are almost entirely subject to state control. With that said, most state governments have granted cities some autonomy in the form of home rule, which permits cities to pass laws and govern themselves within the constraints set out by the state constitution. New York City in particular has a long history of fighting for greater autonomy from the typically more conservative State Legislature. Some, like Kenneth Stahl in “Preemption, Federalism, and Local Democracy,” label intrastate federalism a practical failure. In his analysis of the rise of preemptive action by states, he describes how political polarization and zero-sum political thinking has led states to increasingly preempt local laws, highlighting the degree to which cities are subject to the whims of the state’s they reside within. Those who speak explicitly on city-state interactions like Rick Su in “Intrastate Federalism” focus on analyzing how intrastate conflict contributes to the balance of power between the national government and the states. This kind of literature fails to fully recognize the city as an agent or show how states and cities can cooperate to achieve a common goal. While New York City and New York State certainly have disputes that are combative, on the issue of gun violence they are united. This cooperation provides a valuable case study on how states can bolster the ability of cities to address issues like gun violence. 

The New York State legislature has a long history of strict gun laws, dating back to 2000 under Governor Pataki. Pataki broke away from the Republican party to pass a gun control law which prohibited straw purchases, mandated background checks for handgun buyers at gun shows, and funded further study of where illegal guns are coming from. The law was the nation’s strictest at the time it passed. He also targeted gun trafficking specifically in 2001, calling for SWIFT (Special Weapons Interdiction Field Team), a state police program that would investigate potential gun traffickers. More recent legislatures have only continued this work to combat gun violence and trafficking. The SAFE act in 2013, which expanded the ban on assault weapons, included provisions to keep firearms away from mentally ill people and impose stiffer penalties on illegal gun usage. Legislative action aimed at restricting gun violence has continued since, including legislation like the Scott J. Beigel unfinished receiver act, which cracked down on ghost guns by limiting the ability to sell and order guns in pieces, and a legislative package that strengthened red flag laws, encouraged investigation into the microstamping of guns, closed loopholes by expanding the definition of firearms, and more. All of this has combined to mean that today New York State has the second strictest gun laws in the nation according to Everytown Research and Policy.

Gubernatorial executive support has been extensive as well. Andrew Cuomo went as far as to declare gun violence a “disaster emergency” in an executive order that categorized gun violence as a public health crisis. This executive order demanded greater data collection from police, increased funding available to combat gun violence, and created the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and Governor’s Council on Gun Violence Reduction. Governor Hochul has provided direct support for New York City’s anti-gun violence initiatives, including $30 million in July of 2023. This support has been coupled with extensive cooperation between state and city law enforcement. New York State created a police unit targeting interstate trafficking in 2022 that worked closely with the NYPD to ultimately double the amount of illegal guns seized by the state compared to 2021. The NYPD, NYSP, OAG, and DEA have worked together on investigations targeting ghost gun trafficking rungs and been successful in seizing firearms, particularly ghost guns. The impact of the state and the city alone, however, is limited in preventing trafficking. While they can perform gun buyback programs, like the one conducted in 2022 by the NYPD, Queens DA Melinda Katz, and AG Letitia James, and these demonstrate a willingness by the state to combat gun violence in New York City, these fail to stem the flow of guns into the community. 

New York State has also passed legislation to empower cities in the legal fight against gun violence. N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law § 898 prohibited any member of the gun industry from “contribut[ing] to a condition in New York State that endangers the safety or health of the public through the sale, manufacturing, importing or marketing of a qualified product” and empowered “the people of the state of New York, or a city corporation counsel on behalf of the locality” to restrain violations and obtain restitution. The city of Buffalo has utilized this law to sue gun manufacturers.

The result of all these regulations is a state government that has substantially bolstered New York City’s power and ability to limit gun violence. This assistance is not just for New York City’s benefit — 52% of crime guns in New York State were collected outside of the city. New York State’s extensive gun control and anti-gun trafficking initiatives are a clear demonstration of state-city cooperation and coordination to combat a problem.

National Government Factors

As previously discussed, interactions between the national government and state governments form the basis of traditional federalism literature. Cities, by contrast, have often been seen as lacking the legal backing and autonomy to meaningfully interact with the national government, and thus have not received attention in this capacity, particularly in the United States. Richard Schragger has written extensively on this issue, and argues in “The City in the Future of Federalism” that cities need greater recognition in the federalism literature given their economic, cultural, and social significance. While the issue of gun violence does support the idea that cities are unable to substantively resist or change national policy, that does not mean that the impact of the national government on cities is not worth analyzing. Their relative impotence is informative and can help to illustrate the current structural distribution of power between national and city governments. 

National government interference in the fight against gun violence is extensive. Some of the most explicit impact comes in the form of legislation passed to protect gun manufacturers and distributors. In 2005 Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). Following several lawsuits against gun manufacturers in the 1990s that alleged the creation of a public nuisance resulting from permissive sales practices that facilitated gun trafficking and violent crime, the gun industry extensively lobbied Congress for immunity. These lawsuits sought restitution and to force the gun industry to adopt more restrictive sales practices. The PLCAA gave the gun industry broad protections from most civil liability claims in both federal and state court. There are, however, narrow exceptions available, including for when a dealer or manufacturer transfers a gun to a person with the knowledge that they intended to use it to commit a crime or violate regulations for ownership. This exception is what the Bloomberg administration utilized in its gun stings in which agents demonstrated that the purchase was occurring on behalf of someone else, a clear violation of federal law prohibiting straw purchases. Further, this law is currently being used by the gun industry in National Shooting Sports Foundation, Inc. et al v. James in a bid to overturn N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law § 898, which permits cities to sue the gun industry for contributing to gun violence, as discussed earlier. The case is currently pending before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The PLCAA itself has also been alleged to be unconstitutional, the case for which is also still pending.

Further, the national government has severely limited information on gun violence by constraining the amount of funding available for research and restricting who has access to gun violence data. In 1996, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment which stipulates that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” This severely limited the amount of research funding available for gun violence, and was exacerbated in 2011 when the restriction was expanded to the National Institutes of Health. With the exception of falls, gun violence research receives less federal funding than any of the other top 20 causes of death in the United States — just $63 per life lost compared to a median of $4852 per life lost. Even the information that the national government does collect often cannot be used for research. The most notable of this kind of limitation are the Tiahrt Amendments, passed in 2003 at the behest of the NRA and the Fraternal Order of the Police, which require that the FBI destroy all approved gun purchaser records within 24 hours of approval, prohibits the ATF from releasing firearm trace data, and prevents the ATF from creating regulations that would require gun dealers to submit inventories to law enforcement. In 2008, the Tiahrt Amendments were loosened to allow for the sharing of firearm trace data with law enforcement and the publishing of aggregate data, but still prohibits cities from using gun trace data in civil enforcement actions or researchers from accessing the information, hampering city power and requiring state governments to take up the slack in information gathering. According to David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the NRA has resisted legislation for years that would expand the ability of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to maintain a database of gun purchases, or exercise stronger control over the secondary market, meaning that the ATF has virtually no insight into the iron pipeline. 

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which is responsible for overseeing licensed dealers and conducting oversight of the gun industry, has not just been limited in information gathering, but has also been hamstrung by the federal government through routine underfunding and deliberate mismanagement. This is particularly detrimental to gun violence given that, according to the ATF, corrupt licensed dealers are one of the largest channels for the illegal gun market. From 2010 to 2020, the budget of the ATF grew by only 6% when adjusted for inflation, while gun manufacturing increased by 66 percent from 2010 to 2018. The budget of the ATF in 2021 was $1.48 billion, which activists argue is too small and disproportionately focused on individual acts of gun violence instead of gun industry compliance. In the fiscal year of 2020, the ATF conducted only 5,827 compliance inspections in the entire country, meaning that less than 5% of federal firearm licensees were inspected. Such a rate means it would take 20 years to inspect all licensees. This is compared to the roughly 12,000 inspections a year in the 1990s.

Further, there is a deliberate management problem from the top down. The ATF simply did not have a permanent director from 2016 to April 2022. This lack of direction coincided with a period in which the ATF was extraordinarily resistant to revoke federal firearm licenses, even in cases of blatant law violations. According to an investigation by the Trace and USA Today, the ATF “has been largely toothless and conciliatory, bending over backward to go easy on wayward dealers…and sometimes allowing guns to flow into the hands of criminals.” Of 2,000 gun dealer inspections that uncovered violations from 2015 to 2017, over half transferred guns without running a correct background check and 200 sold guns to people who indicated via paperwork that they could not legally own them. Despite this, only 3% of the inspections that revealed a violation resulted in a license revocation. One of the stores that was given three separate warnings for various offenses, including missing over 600 guns, was ultimately revealed to have trafficked potentially thousands of guns. Each one of these violations could have been enough to shut down the store, but the ATF simply handed out warnings. Some of the weaknesses of the ATF are also legislated. The Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, lobbied for by the NRA and passed in 1986, prevents the ATF from inspecting a gun dealer more than once a year unless multiple record-keeping violations are recorded. This, combined with requirements to audit the 9,400 explosives dealers every three years instituted in 2002, has dramatically restrained the quantity of inspections of gun dealers that the ATF can conduct each year. An investigation conducted by the Department of Justice found that “the ATF’s inspection program is not fully effective for ensuring that FFLs comply with federal firearms laws because inspections are infrequent and of inconsistent quality…Even when numerous or serious violations were found, the ATF did not uniformly take adverse actions, refer FFLs for investigation, or conduct timely follow-up inspections.”

The court system in the United States has also shaped New York City’s gun violence response, though thus far the city has been able to largely adapt to most rulings. In addition to preventing cities from eliminating individual’s access to guns by affirming an individual's right to bear arms and striking down handgun bans in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, the Supreme Court struck down a law in New York City that prohibited carrying a handgun in public. In response, Mayor Adams spoke out against the ruling before ultimately working with the New York City Council to pass a new law that bans guns in many public locations, bans guns in private locations if the owner's consent is not given, and requires that people who are seeking gun licenses show “good moral character,” a law which has been upheld by the Supreme Court so far. 

Finally, it is worth stating that the national government has occasionally assisted New York City in responding to gun violence, particularly when the White House is sensitive to the issue. There have been several executive actions by the Biden Administration aimed at reducing gun violence by instructing the Department of Justice and the ATF to enforce existing gun laws more stringently. In July of 2021, the DOJ launched five gun trafficking task forces, the U.S. Attorney General directed prosecutors to prioritize gun trafficking, and the Department of the Treasury awarded the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice over $20.5 million to support efforts to reduce gun violence. In 2022, the ATF tripled the number of licenses revoked from federal firearm licensees compared to 2021, jumping to 92. Additionally, Congress passed the SAFER Communities Act which increased penalties for straw purchasing and gun trafficking, defined “federally licensed firearms dealer” more clearly, and established more funding for gun violence prevention. Federal prosecutors announced one of the first busts under these harsher penalties for a New York City gun trafficking ring. 

Ultimately, New York City is legally at the mercy of Congress, hamstrung federal agencies, and a judicial system that prioritizes second amendment protections over city sovereignty. These constraints have hampered the ability of New York City to crack down on gun violence and provide a valuable example of the impact of the national government on a city. 

Conclusion

New York City does an exceptional job at addressing gun violence given its limitations, but it is, in fact, limited. Local gun violence prevention, even when supported by a politically aligned state government, is substantially affected by factors well outside of its control. New York City can never be completely successful as it simply does not have full autonomy of its laws, funding, or borders. This is a story of how close a city can get to eliminating gun violence given these conditions, and a story of how a city can use innovative solutions to navigate these restrictions, be it through gun stings on out-of-state dealers or adapting local legislation to get around Supreme Court rulings. For those attempting to better address gun violence either in New York City or in other cities around the United States, there are crucial lessons here. The limitations of city power mean that a city cannot be held entirely responsible for its gun violence, nor can it claim total credit for its reduction. Attention is best focused on either clever ways to adapt to policies outside of the city’s control, or on changing the policies that are impacting the city. 

Finally, traditional federalism has left the city neglected. The lack of constitutional recognition of cities means they have largely been treated as an agent of the state, so the balance of power between it and other levels of government has been effectively ignored. Inadequate city power prevents cities from achieving their desired goals, leaving a more local level of government at the whims of those far outside of its borders. Regardless of the very real limitations placed on cities by other levels of government, power analysis is still valuable here. The city is indeed capable of resisting, responding to, and subverting other levels of government, and illustrating power imbalance is useful in making the case for greater local autonomy. City-focused federalism extends far beyond gun control — parallel stories exist on issues like affordable housing with clear intrastate antagonism, and drug usage with federal and interstate interaction. It also extends far beyond New York City. New York City is not unique in the constraints it faces, and while its substantial population and cultural strength make its conflicts with other levels of government more visible, other cities have them just the same. There is more research to be done in these areas.

The future of gun violence in New York City is undetermined. The fight against gun violence experienced a substantial setback in 2020. The pandemic caused a substantial disruption to efforts aimed at reducing gun violence by governments and nonprofits alike, and the nation experienced a rise in gun violence and increased gun ownership. Regardless of New York City’s ability to manage this crisis within its own borders, the way the nation as a whole responds will impact it. New York City does not stand alone in resisting gun violence, but neither does it stand unopposed.