(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – A new gun law went into effect in New York on Thursday, requiring applicants for a concealed carry permit to give the state their social media accounts for the review process.
As per the Democrat-sponsored legislation, residents of New York seeking a firearm will have to provide the authorities with a complete list of the social media accounts they have used over the past three years before they can be approved for concealed carry.
Thus, state regulators will comb through an applicant’s social media activity to decide whether they have “the character” to carry a gun, Fox5 reported.
The requirement that applicants’ social media posts be inspected by the state of New York was added to the state gun ownership legislation after some lawmakers argued that in the cases of some mass shootings, the perpetrators made online posts suggesting they may engage in that type of violence.
The new gun law has been described as “burdensome” by the New York Sheriffs’ Association regarding the obligations of local government officials to review applicants’ social media accounts.
Besides requiring that New York applicants for concealed carry surrender all information on their social media activity over the past three years, the new gun law in the state also mandates that they undergo 16 hours of classroom training plus two hours of live-fire drills.
Another provision of the law establishes a list of places in the state – characterized as “sensitive” where carrying a firearm is banned altogether.
The list features churches, schools, theaters, subways, amusement parks, and Times Square in New York City.
The legislation containing the significant curbs on the right of concealed carry was adopted in a rush by the Democrat-dominated legislature of the state of New York after the United States Supreme Court ruled that its previous gun laws were unconstitutional.
As New York’s new gun law was being discussed in July, the executive director of the New York Sheriffs’ Association, Peter Kehoe, blasted the legislation’s social media requirement for infringing upon Second Amendment rights.
He also complained that sheriffs in the state wouldn’t receive additional funding or staff to handle the new requirements and declared that sheriff’s offices would probably not even look at applicants’ social media information.
“I don’t think we would do that. I think it would be a constitutional invasion of privacy,” Kehoe said back then.
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