The Anti-gun Laws That Make Progressives Uneasy

In new york city last month, Mayor Eric Adams announced new plans to combat a sharp rise in gun violence. Some progressives worry that the proposal—which includes measures to crack down on illegal gun use—is a Trojan horse to reverse recent criminal-justice reforms. But Manhattan’s progressive district attorney, Alvin Bragg, seems to be on board with Adams’s efforts. While campaigning last year, Bragg said that he would “avoid prosecuting people for gun possession unless they were actually involved in violent crime,” The New York Times reported. Now, “in a sign of the shifting concerns,” he says he’ll aggressively prosecute gun possession and other crimes, “a seeming response to pushback for his adoption of lenient policies.”

Gun cases pull progressives in opposite directions. They generally favor the strict gun-control laws that prevail in many liberal jurisdictions, commonly advocating even stricter laws meant to reduce gun possession and crime. Yet they are also sharply critical of laws that yield long prison sentences disproportionately for men of color and cut against reformers’ push to reduce mass incarceration. And anti-racist ideology offers no simple answers about how aggressively to prosecute gun cases. Which should a D.A. opposed to racial inequity prioritize—the disproportionate rate at which Black and Latino residents are arrested for possessing firearms, or the disproportionate burden gun violence and deaths impose on those same communities?