NYPD official: SCOTUS gun ruling could turn NY into ‘Wild East’

The Supreme Court ruling striking down a century-old New York gun law will cause the amount of firearms in the hands of “criminals” to skyrocket — turning the Empire State into the “Wild East,” a top police official warned.

NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller predicted in an interview aired Sunday that the number of people allowed to carry guns in New York City will “surge” as a result of the high court’s decision overturning a law that restricted the carrying of concealed firearms.

“The worry here is that they’re going to make this the wild, wild East,” he told “The Cats Roundtable” host John Catsimatidis on WABC 770.

The Sullivan Act, which dated back to 1913, required New Yorkers show “proper cause” that a handgun was needed for self-defense in order to obtain a license to carry it in public. The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association and two upstate men challenged the law, claiming it violated their Second Amendment rights.

In a ruling released Thursday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the 6-3 majority that the law “violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.”

NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller predicted the Supreme Court overturning a New York state gun law will turn the city into the “Wild East.”

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Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, projected that overturning the law would increase suicides, as well as accidental shootings by children. The quantity of violent lawbreakers who wind up possessing firearms would soar, too, he said.

“Nobody can really tell a story that says any great good has come from these kinds of changes in other places,” he said.

“We do know that if you go into a situation where there’s a lot of restricted locations where you cannot carry your firearm — whether that’s hospitals or schools — that people tend to leave those in cars, the cars tend to get broken into, and the guns tend to get stolen, which means that legally obtained guns are now turning into illegal guns in the hands of criminals,” Miller explained.

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 to overturn the 1913 Sullivan Act which required New Yorkers to show “proper cause” to receive a license to carry handguns.

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“The mayor, the police commissioner [Keechant Sewell], and every police officer has a grave concern that putting more guns on the streets of New York is not going to come to a good end.”

Mayor Eric Adams joined other Democratic elected officials in New York in ripping the ruling Thursday, saying it “made every single one of us less safe from gun violence.”

The head of a local anti-crime group said he was also “concerned” about the effects of the decision, forecasting more fatal shootings in the state and elsewhere.

Miller said that the ruling may lead to guns getting into the hands of “criminals.”

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“I’m concerned that the Supreme Court has now taken the single largest step it is ever taken in expanding gun rights by expanding the right to carry a concealed weapon to every American anywhere, anytime, anyplace,” Citizens Crime Commission of New York City President Richard Aborn said during an appearance on Catsimatidis’ weekly radio show. “This is not going to be helpful for public safety.”

“It makes the job of the NYPD and police departments across the country much more dangerous,” added the nonprofit group chief in the interview aired Sunday. “It takes a myriad of little interactions that we have in cities every day and turns them into the potential for becoming deadly encounters.”