Thank you so much Angela, for your words. I am fired up, but for the work that you are doing every day. And for all of you, Moms Demand Action, I see all the red shirts out there as well. I’m humbled to be here.

And I want to thank the Governor, for her steadfast leadership across a whole spectrum of public safety issues, but particularly on guns.

3D-printed guns are not just emerging, they’re here, they are a real problem for us in law enforcement, and the proposals that you’re setting forward now, are gonna, as you say, save lives. So thank you, thank you, thank you, Governor Hochul.

In addition, of course, I want to thank our State Superintendent, and our other law enforcement partners, ATF, NYPD.

Assemblymember Rosenthal, who has been working on ghost guns for the past several years, has been a great thought partner.

And of course, the phenomenal district attorneys from across the state of New York, who are doing these cases every day.

The Mayor and the Governor already did the table setting I was gonna do on the backdrop. I know the Governor was in the city yesterday, New York City, and talking about the great numbers there, but I do think that is the starting point.

It’s phenomenal to hear the numbers in Albany and the statewide numbers, and I’m humbled, so I’ll just add Manhattan numbers to that.

Since I took officer four years ago, shootings are down in Manhattan 66%. That’s the due to the funding that the Governor has arranged, that’s due to law reforms, it’s due to all the advocacy, it’s all of our numbers together. And so, I do think that’s the backdrop, but as the Governor said, we can’t stand still.

The proliferation of these cheap, cheap – we’re talking about a couple hundred dollars – to buy a 3D-printer.

And you can sit at your kitchen table, and just in the time that I’ve been in office, the time it takes, the technology keeps getting faster and faster.

You can sit at your kitchen table, go do the dishes, do a couple of other things and you have a gun printed out. And so, this is really something that we need to urgently address.

The Governor talked about the iron pipeline, she called this the plastic pipeline, I’ve been calling it the kitchen table pipeline because in our cases people are literally just sitting in their kitchens and then printing out these lethal machines. 

So how this is going to help us? It’s gonna help us DA’s in two ways:

The first is enforcement. We have new tools, if this passes, when this passes, to hold people accountable.

What I always like to emphasize with people is we use this term ghost, it sounds like Casper the Ghost, these are real killing machines.

So just to use on example from a case we had: someone who sat in their kitchen in Harlem, printed out a ghost gun, and then went to Central Park, a place of peace and…games and fun, and test-fired that ghost gun in Central Park.

This bill, becoming law, gives us more tools to stop that.

And the second piece, and this is equally if not more important, we heard it from a number of people…is prevention, right? On the front foot.

If we can get the companies not to allow guns to be printed in the first place. I think about it in terms of counterfeit money: if all of us could go home right now and go to our printer and print out casinos…and all become millionaires, we would say that’s crazy. We can’t allow that.

This is even worse because this is printing something out that’s killing someone. So that is what we are up against here.

These companies, we started engaging with them in my Office…earlier this year, last year, and talking to them, and got some agreements about things that they would do to prevent these kind of printings.

But those are voluntary discussions, from one office to a company, using the bully pulpit if you will. What the Governor is proposing today is law, right? The difference between a call and say, “will you please, won’t you do this, this will save a life” versus saying “in the great state of New York, this will not be tolerated, this is the law.”

So thank you Governor, I am so so excited, I can’t wait to come back and see you sign it and get one of those great pens.

That will be a great day, because it will be a day where lives are saved.

So, with that, all that we do in the DA’s, we all know this right, we sit behind desks and draft search warrants, and complaints.

The women and men in uniform go out and put [themselves] in harm’s way, and we’re honored to work with the police department, NYPD, ATF and of course, the State Troopers. So with that I’ll give way and bring up the Superintendent.

Thank you to, and Governor, thank you so much.

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