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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With the news this morning that Mayor de Blasio has announced the full reopening of the city for July 1st, with a new census count removing a congressional seat from New York State, with President Biden discussing guns in his address to the nation last night and a new gun law proposal in the New York State Senate. We welcome now the sponsor of that legislation, State Senator Zellnor Myrie, who represents Central Brooklyn. Senator, it's always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Zellnor Myrie: Really good to be back with you Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask first how you are? I heard you got pretty hard hit by COVID.

Zellnor Myrie: I did. I was diagnosed in January. Had a pretty rough going the next couple of months. I still have some long-haul symptoms, but I am happy to report that I'm fresh off my first dose of the vaccine yesterday. Got it right here in the district at Medgar Evers College. Have a sore arm. I'm still a little bit woozy, but feeling good. Hopefully, this will ease some of the long-haul symptoms that I have.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I certainly hope so. You're an example of how the pandemic is not over even as the CDC guidelines are loosening for vaccinated people. Mayor de Blasio announced this morning, a full reopening of the city on July 1st and is forcing city office workers back to their desks beginning next Monday. We've gotten lots of calls from city workers objecting to that.

The legislature just overruled the governor, as you know, on the requirement to buy food with alcohol, which had a pandemic safety hook to that requirement. How much is anyone getting this reopening pace right or going too quickly in your opinion? You might have heard Congress Espaillat just a second ago say, he'd rather the city open more gradually than boom on July 1st.

Zellnor Myrie: I'd have to say that I agree with the congressman. I'm a little more circumspect on the pace of reopening, certainly, as someone who has experienced COVID personally. Really, I think we should, as public policy, imperative follow the science. If the science says that we should be opening at a certain pace, that's what we should be doing.

We've gotten into trouble, Brian, by not doing that in the past. It's part of the reason why you saw the legislature take steps to rescind some of these executive orders by the governor that we didn't believe was really guided by science. I think that we should continue to follow in that regard. Hopefully, we will follow what the health experts say and not necessarily what we believe the best thing to do is.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure you have plenty of constituents who are city workers. Do you have any opinion on them going back to their desk jobs. Not all at once, but they're going to start bringing them back in large numbers on Monday. A lot of them don't want to do it based on the calls I get, but Mayor de Blasio is adamant that they can do it safely.

Zellnor Myrie: I think that it should be left up to the city workers. These are the same folks who have kept our city running through this once-in-a-century pandemic. I think they should be afforded the choice on whether to return or not. I think that there has been a cadre of city workers that have never had the luxury of staying home to work. For those folks, I think they should be given some of these options as well. I am very grateful to many of them who put their lives on the line while allowing us to stay home safely. I think they should be given the choice on whether they want to return back.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about your gun law proposal. I saw your Daily News op-ed on it. Would you first, for our listeners, put it in the context as you did that I think is really important of gun violence in New York City as opposed to the mass shootings that make the more sensational news?

Zellnor Myrie: Happy to do that. I represent many neighborhoods in central Brooklyn that have been at the height of the gun violence crisis. Just in New York City alone, shootings are up 257%. This is something that doesn't make national news, but which rips at our communities on a daily basis. To be frank Brian, this is an issue that has plagued communities of color, time immemorial. Anytime there's a mass shooting where the victims or the survivors are mostly white or it happens in more affluent areas, that's what gets the attention.

I've made a concerted effort to direct our focus on this issue that has been plaguing communities like the ones that I represent and the ones that I grew up in.

What this bill stands for is a very simple proposition. If you are a gun manufacturer, you are a corporation, you are a gun dealer, that has a business model predicated on your product flowing into the illegal market and ending up on the streets in Brownsville, in Rochester, in Albany, you should have to take the proper safety precautions or you will be held liable.

I think that we have done a good job here in New York and leading the way on having gun safety laws that prevent some of the things we see across the country. We really have an illegal gun problem, not a legal one. It's important for our listeners to understand that every illegal gun was at one point, a legal gun. If you're going to make money off of selling legal guns, you better take the precautions to make sure that they don't become illegal and end up spilling blood on our streets.

Brian Lehrer: Well, what precautions could those be? Because the gun makers would say they are making a legal, in fact, constitutionally protected product and if criminals smuggle them illegally from one place to another to sell outside the system, that's bad and dangerous, but it's not the fault of how they made their product. How would you respond to that?

Zellnor Myrie: I'd first say that the concept of civil liability is not foreign in this country. In fact, the overwhelming majority of industries have civil liability. Some of the safety precautions that we take for granted today, airbags, seat belts, what we have seen with the tobacco industry, this wasn't the result of the goodwill of the industry or the goodwill of some corporate executive. This was done by litigation. It was because people were harmed and people said, "You need to be held responsible for your product regardless of how far down the chain it is." This is the same concept that we're bringing to this issue.

The state just declared gun violence a public health crisis. We were the first state in the nation to do that. We passed that in the Community Violence Intervention Act. This is a contributor to this public health crisis.

Gun dealers can, for instance, make sure that they're not selling an inordinate amount of guns to one particular person, more guns than that person could ever use. We have microstamping technology that could be put forth by gun manufacturers to ensure that these guns stay with the legal owner. There are other precautions that they can take to help secure their guns. A number of gun dealers have a consistent amount of guns stolen from them on a consistent basis and they should take some precautions to stop that.

Again, this isn't a presumption of guilt. This simply allows victims and impacted individuals to get into the courthouse to say, "Here is what you could have done to stop this."

What we did in 2005, the Congress did, was passed a law that said no one gets to go inside of a courthouse and have their day in court. We're saying we shouldn't allow this blanket immunity and give New Yorkers who are impacted by gun violence the opportunity to have their day.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP-88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio as we continue with State Senator Zellnor Myrie from Central Brooklyn. We're talking Brownsville, East Flatbush, Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Park Slope, Gowanus, and a few others in that greater region.

We know, senator, that there's an increase in shootings in the city in the last year. Gun manufacturers didn't change how they make or distribute guns, presumably in that period of time. Something else has changed that's killing New Yorkers now. The NYPD and others say laws passed by you all in the legislature last year are contributing, such as bail reform that went too far. They say to allow people arrested on gun charges in some cases and others who pose an actual threat to remain free on no bail while they await trial. What would you say to that in particular and what do you think is causing the spike in general?

Zellnor Myrie: Brian, with all due respect to the police department and to the police commissioner, who I think has been the chief proponent of this theory, there is no connection to reality for this proposition. The NYPD's own numbers indicate that it's not due to the laws that we have passed. Any sort of objective observation would also bring that to bear. Look, it is not just New York that has experienced an uptick in violence. This has been a national problem. Shootings are up everywhere in the country. It hasn't been every state that has re-hauled their criminal legal systems in the way that we did.

Gun Violence is a complicated issue. There are many causes for it. What the NYPD does is react after the gun violence has happened. There's a lot of things that we should be doing to prevent it from happening in the first place. There are economic reasons. There are educational reasons. There are healthcare reasons of why this is up. It's precisely why I authored a bill, the Community Violence Intervention Act that sought for community and hospital-based interventions that would help us to prevent this in the first place. I couldn't disagree with the commissioner and the police department more about the causes of gun violence.

Now, it's important for us to remember that there are reasons that people resort to gun violence. If we address those reasons, if we look to solutions, we're going to be in a much better place.

Brian Lehrer: You know that Republicans and some other people, some in law enforcement, would say the scrutiny and vilification of police since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis cop, has caused law-abiding cops to pull back from enforcement out of fear of being unfairly targeted for brutality. That's allegedly another piece of what's happening. What's your reaction to that?

Zellnor Myrie: I can't speak to whether there has been a pullback by police officers on the street. I have to work with a number of law enforcement folks in my district. The police on the ground that I've had relationships with, have not been pulling back and I think have been a bit more solution-oriented than what we've seen from the NYPD leadership. I'd stress again, that if you don't want to be demonized for brutality, there's a very simple solution to that, do not brutalize. Do the job that you were hired to do, to keep people safe.

This notion that they are being unfairly targeted, to me, I think it's unacceptable, mostly, because there's this old adage that when you have been superior for most of your tenure, equality feels like suppression. What we're having now is a real conversation about accountability. If that accountability feels like oppression, suppression, attacks, then so be it. Any of us who are serious about the movement for police reform, are not about attacking officers. We just wanted to be treated in an equal manner.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from a constituent I think. Justin in Brownsville, you're on WNYC with state Senator Zellnor Myrie. Hi, Justin.

Justin: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. Good morning to your guest. This is a question on my mind, with the mayors and your guest here. We keep talking about taking guns from the bad guys, which is very impossible. Even if it's possible, it's going to take a long time to do that. People are coming in with illegal guns in this state. The problem we having, these people are not talking about how people like me can protect myself. Dead man cannot dial out of 911, and that's the only option I hear on the table.

This gun law that Mayor de Blasio, who I vote for and who I love, is bragging about is crap. A policeman was hijacked in Canarsie the other day. He's alive today because he has a gun, he's an off-duty police officer could protect himself. If it was me, I would be dead. Right?

We are not having a discussion. Oh, good, we have the safest gun law, when one guy can walk in any store with 10 people.

Brian Lehrer: Justin, you want it to be easier for regular civilians to own guns for self-defense in New York City. That's what you're saying. Right?

Justin: Right. My question is, how does citizen like me can protect myself from the criminals who have the gun? How can the taxi operator protect himself from the criminal who is going to come behind him and put a gun to his head? All we do call the police and when the police react, now, we blame the police even though I agree that these police are aggressive in many cases. Why we are doing the same thing, expect different results?

Brian Lehrer: Senator Myrie.

Zellnor Myrie: Thank you so much, Justin, for this call and for your question and sentiment. This is really important for us to discuss, I think particularly the way that you ended this. Why are we using the same solutions for problems that persist without a different result? The truth is the way that we have been doing things has not worked. The approach that we've used against gun violence, against getting guns off the street, against keeping our public safe, have failed us. Using a police-alone approach has not worked. I think that we propose some solutions, we know that most of the gun violence is concentrated within a small group of activity, a small group of people.

The truth is that we can't arrest our way out of that problem, we have to deal with the small group of individuals who are getting most of their guns, by the way, from out of the state. 74% of the guns found on crime scenes, like you described, Justin, are from out of state. They're not from New York, they're not from folks who are doing this legally. One of the approaches, it's not the only approach, but one of the approaches I think we need to do is to cut off that pipeline so that we'd get 74% of those guns off the street that are not from here and start dealing with the very small group of individuals who are committing the overwhelming majority of the gun crimes.

Brian Lehrer: Justin, thank you very much. Please keep calling us. We're almost out of time, but I see you had a lot to say on Twitter, Senator, after the census figures were announced with New York State, just 89 people short of keeping the same number of congressional seats. As it is, we would lose one. Who blew what as you see it?

Zellnor Myrie: Brian, you know that the census was my thing. This was the number one issue in my office. We marshaled every resource that we had. We sent mailers, we did robocalls, we held parades, we did webinars, we were out on the streets. We did everything possible to ensure that we had the highest census count possible. The problem was, we asked the governor to allocate the resources to help us to do this work, to help the community groups on the ground who were trusted to do this work. The honest truth is that the governor dragged his feet and didn't release the money until almost a month before the count was due.

The fact that we were short by 89 people suggest to me that had those resources been allocated when they were first given almost two years ago, then we would have been in a much better place. Let this be a lesson going forward that you should listen to the communities that are most impacted by this. When we are asking for the resources, the census tract in my district, almost 80% of them in the 2010 census, were what we call hard to count census tracts. That means that there was reluctance to engage with the census for a myriad of reasons.

We knew this going into it, and that's precisely why we asked for the resources to ensure that even during a pandemic, we would have folks participate. New York City did its job. I commend the mayor, I commend the NY Census 2020 effort because we were able to match the 2010 numbers even during the pandemic. The state fell down on the job here, and hopefully, we'll be able to rectify it going forward.

Brian Lehrer: Governor Cuomo wants to go to court perhaps to challenge the count. He asked the Attorney General Letitia James to look into whether there's an illegal avenue. Do you have an opinion on if there's a legal basis?

Zellnor Myrie: My understanding of this is that we have tried to do this in the past. I think with the last census count, there was an attempt to take a legal course, to rectify the undercount. I'm not sure whether that's going to be successful. I, of course, am hopeful that we could pursue that avenue, but it is much better in my mind for us to have done what we needed to do during the census, and while everyone on the ground was screaming for it. Hopefully, we'll have some legal recourse. I'm not terribly optimistic. This has been done and tried in the past. I really hope this is instructive for us going forward.

Brian Lehrer: State Senator Zellnor Myrie from District 20 in Brooklyn, which includes neighborhoods like Brownsville, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Sunset, Park, Park Slope, South Slope, Gowanus, East Flatbush. Maybe I got them all, maybe I didn't. Senator, I hope you continue to recover from your COVID. You sound great. Feel well, and thanks for coming on with us today.

Zellnor Myrie: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

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