In New York, you don’t expect people to have guns

Living in New York City doesn’t often feel like living in America. A lot of things that exist in the wider country – trailer parks, school shootings, NRA meetings, meth labs, cowboys, Confederate flags – are either nonexistent or vanishingly rare within the urban boundaries. Though most things Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens says are – in the words of Joe Biden – complete malarkey, it’s true that “East Coast liberals” don’t know the same America as suburban midwesterners, Bible Belt evangelists, ranchers in Wyoming or farmers in Kansas.

That means you come to expect a different kind of lifestyle to what you might find in Texas, Tennessee or Montana. You expect that most people you meet will vote Democrat and bemoan the healthcare system. You expect fewer lawns and windows adorned with American flags, and schools that don’t make the Pledge of Allegiance compulsory every morning. You expect to be within walking distance of a vegan cafe and a tasteful sex shop at all times. And above all, you expect that the people around you, for the most part, don’t have guns.

That’s not to say that guns are a rarity in New York City. During 2020, gun crime rose to the highest it had been in 15 years here, with a single gang in Brooklyn suspected to be behind 26 murders. Applications for gun licenses also doubled, according to the NYPD.

Trying to get a license for a firearm round here is no joke. It requires about a year in admin, potentially thousands of dollars upfront, and a place to practice. People who apply have to present their social security numbers, state IDs and fingerprints, and legal history. They also have to attend an interview and undergo a comprehensive background check. It’s not like some southern states, where you can pretty much saunter into a gun shop, buy yourself a weapon and some ammo, and saunter out. Little wonder, then, that 70 per cent of illegal guns in New York were bought legally in other states and then transferred in to the area.

Most residents of NYC will never come across a gun, except perhaps one strapped to the side of an on-duty police officer. Gun murders are rare and unlikely to be random. Sandy Hook-style school shootings or Mandalay Bay-style massacres are basically unknown. So it was a big shock to most of the city’s residents when a little girl and two women on a Mother’s Day trip were shot over the weekend in broad daylight by a stranger, right in the middle of the city’s Times Square.

Fortunately, nobody involved was fatally wounded, although four-year-old Skye Martinez had to undergo surgery and 43-year-old Marcela Aldana will have to live with a bullet in her leg for the rest of her life after doctors said it would be too risky to remove it. For a few tense days, the city convulsed in shock: how could this have happened? Videos circulated on social media of police officer sprinting to tourniquet little Skye’s leg before picking her up and flagging down an ambulance. Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke gravely about “the flood of illegal guns in our city”.

Now, a suspect – Farrakhan Muhammad – has been named, but nobody has been arrested. Police are working on the assumption that Muhammad was allegedly aiming for his brother and accidentally hit the family groups crowding in the square. The idea that midtown Manhattan, a part of New York usually awash with tourists and home to the most expensive hotels in the city, can suddenly become a battleground wherein a young girl toy-shopping with her family can receive grave injuries recalls the bad old days of crime-ridden NYC. If it had happened in a Brooklyn project or on a poor street in Queens, however, I doubt the interest would be as high, nor the uproar quite as loud.

Even more weirdly, these types of “minor” shooting incidents are seen all the time in small American towns where gun control is unheard of and everyone’s armed to the hilt. In 2021 alone, the US has averaged more than one mass shooting per day. And the Times Square incident doesn’t even count by the metric of the Gun Violence Archive which gave me that stat: the organisation only adds a red dot to its map when more than four people per incident have been injured or killed.

Yes, it’s easy to pretend you live in a cosy little enclave when you live in New York. But every now and then, something happens to remind you that you actually live in America.