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New York Giant's Plaxico Burress from www.wallpaperpimper.com

The case of New York Giants football star Plaxico Burress, who shot himself in a nightclub last month, has stirred up another type of gun battle in New York City.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg pushed for a law in New York City requiring mandatory a minimum of three and half years in prison for anyone with an unregistered gun in public. Bloomberg said he would make sure that same law would be put to the test to convict Burress.

Now, mayors in other cities are looking at New York City as an example to find a way to deal with illegal guns. The Mayors in Greater Cleveland recently joined Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group organized less than three years ago by Mayor Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to help create local, state and Federal laws to keep illegal guns out off the streets.

The New York City Police Department said the number of murders and shootings this year have increased by over 10 percent compared to 2007. NYPD reported there have been 377 murders in September 2008 compared to 344 during the same period last year. Shootings are up from 1,324 incidents last year to 1,420 this year.

An estimated 66 percent of the 16,137 murders in 2004 were committed with firearms, according to the FBI’s Crime in the United States, a Web publication of its annual uniform crime report. Nine percent of the 4.7 million victims of violent crimes in 2005 stated that they faced an offender with a firearm, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Homicides of teens and young adults are more likely to be committed with a gun than homicides of persons of other ages, according to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports from 1976 to 2005.

The NYPD and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office tried to find a solution to the city’s gun violence problem with the $100,000 program known as “Cash for Guns.” Research shows that government gun-buyback program take out about three million guns out of circulation each year from the 200 million to 350 million privately owned guns in the United States, with at least 4 million more added annually, according to the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis. However, other studies show that the pool of guns that are used in homicides and suicides are different than the guns turned in, according to the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Firearm Injury Center.

Although big city mayors like Bloomberg are trying to find ways to keep illegal guns off the streets, they couldn’t deter those people from around the country who ran out to buy legal firearms after the Nov. 4 presidential election.

A woman signs a lantern at a memorial ceremony at Pier 40

On Thursday, I went down to Pier 40 to check out the floating lantern ceremony, held each year to commemorate the victims. That’s where I met Steven Wargo, who lost his friend Doug Di Stefano, an investment banker at Cantor Fitzgerald, in the attacks. Wargo and I happen to live in the same neighborhood, so we chatted a bit about that. He talked about how the grief of losing someone in a terrorist attack never really subsides; the pain never goes away. Then, he turned his attention to the slow reconstruction of the area.

 “ What’s frustrating is that the government is still bickering over what to do with the site,” he said. “There is so much unrest of the whole issue.” 

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is chairing a foundation created to build the memorial, happens to agree.

He expressed as much in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal this week, blaming the slow reconstruction in part the many cooks in the kitchen—city government, owners of the WTC site and the Port Authority—as well as the fact that the World Trade Center was not owned by the city.

“…the memorial must be completed by the 10th anniversary,” Bloomberg wrote. “No

more excuses, no more delays. New York Gov. David Paterson and I are in complete agreement on this subject, and it’s time for the PA to formally commit to the same goal.”

The snail pace of reconstruction is an embarrassment for a world-class city like New York and a dishonor to the men and women who died in the towers. It’s high time government officials put aside their egos and political ambitions and found consensus on the issue. It’s already been seven years. How much longer do they need?