Buffalo businessman and Congressional candidate Carl Paladino intends to sue Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature’s Democratic majority over their newly passed gun legislation, he announced Thursday.
The new legislation, passed after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down previous longtime legislation, includes restrictions on where members of the public may be allowed to carry concealed firearms.
Paladino suggests Hochul and Democratic leaders put the new law into place in a “panic.”
“That panic, in a special session created with a certificate of necessity, which means that there's no public hearings, there's no public debate, there's nobody in the public allowed to speak to it,” he said. “That special session put on paper a law that was probably twice or three times as onerous to the Second Amendment as the first one was.”
There are some provisions within the new legislation that, according to Paladino, make sense. These include expansions on training and background checks. But other provisions, he argues, are a government overreach.
“Requiring people to disclose their members of their families to the State of New York, okay, to some licensing person, to sit there and write down the names of your family to disclose your social media accounts. Now you're getting into infringements of the First Amendment rights of the individuals,” he said. “That's even more overreaching.”
Additionally, leaving it to individual business owners to decide whether to allow or disallow carrying of weapon on their premises is, in his opinion, untenable.
Paladino, who is running for the 23rd Congressional District, said he will fund this lawsuit with his own resources and hopes to file by Monday. He has retained local attorney Paul Cambria to lead his case.
