NYC 8 cops shot and it's only April! Illegal guns make city a 'shooting gallery'

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has had enough of the gun violence in the city and thinks it's time for the rest of the country to get vigilant about a comprehensive anti-gun strategy.

This time it was 3301 Nostrand Ave. in the first moments of Easter Sunday, four Emergency Service Unit cops, cops as good as any Ray Kelly has, coming through the door of Apartment 6-K, all being shot by a “very bad dude” — Kelly’s words — named Nakwon Foxworth. Another bad dude in the City of New York with guns, one gun at least from the shoot-happy South.

Nakwon Foxworth has a Browning automatic in 6-K, part of a multiple gun sale in North Carolina eight years ago. He has a military-grade rifle with 20 rounds in the gun, 30 more rounds waiting in what is known as a banana clip. There is also a defaced .22 that is, in the words of the police commissioner, “a mystery.”

“But here is the thing about old guns,” Kelly is saying now. “They can be around a very long time, and then you load them and pull the trigger and they still work, against a cop or anybody else.”

Kelly said: “These are the guns that are turning our city into a shooting gallery. We had three cops shot last year. This year we’ve had eight shot already, and it’s only Easter.”

Finally Kelly said, “I’m tired of this!”

At this time in New York when Kelly is constantly under attack for the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies that took 800 guns off the street last year, when there is this dumb media idea that Kelly is the one who should be taking fire, he said: “There’s a reason why we continue to be proactive on the street.”

Maybe all those who are after Kelly these days think that Nakwon Foxworth and all like him, all the other bad guys who want to arm apartments like 6-K as if they are foxholes and know enough to shoot low under the ballistic shields when cops come through the door, would give up his guns voluntarily if just given enough time to reflect.

It is why the idea that Kelly has somehow turned into a bad guy, in this city at this time, is dumber than the NRA.

Less than 24 hours before the four cops are shot on Nostrand Ave., two uniformed cops approach a couple of guys in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with open containers, 3 a.m. Saturday. One of the guys starts to run when he sees the cops approaching. Then he turns around and opens fire.

But he drops his cell phone at the scene. The cops trace the phone to his girlfriend. She gives them the new number the shooter is using. They catch up with him in a livery cab in Rockaway. He has a graze wound in his shoulder from when the cops returned fire.

The guy says, “They shot me.”

“No gun recovered,” Ray Kelly said Sunday.

The guns keep coming into the city from North Carolina and Virginia. We constantly hear about how it gets easier to get guns now, not harder, and the laws go softer. We see already that if George Zimmerman is ever charged for shooting and killing Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., he will hide behindthe kind of shoot-first law we now have in half the states in this country.

And we have eight cops shot in New York City this year, one of them shot dead. And we haveguys walking up and downthe street in Tulsa, Okla., and gunning down African-Americans. And Trayvon Martin is still dead at 17.

There is no issue on which most major American politicians, and that includes the President, act more cowardly on than guns. That is the great threat here, not a New York City mayor like Mike Bloomberg and a police commissioner like Kelly who’ve gone hard — as hard as you can — against bad gun laws and gun lobbyists and gun sellers, even as the mayor is about to leave his job and there is this sudden, insane rush to get Kelly out of his.

“There is no easy solution to this problem,” Kelly said Sunday, “absent a comprehensive anti-gun strategy throughout the country, as opposed to a pro-gun strategy. In New York, we have every law we need on the books. The problem isn’t this state, it’s all the other ones.”

Then Kelly, after another long night in the middle of a long war against guns in his city, said: “We got another happy ending last night, because no New York City cop died. But eventually we’re going to run the limit on happy endings. And yet somehow thereseems to be no appetite, oneither side of the aisle in Washington, to do anything tohelp us.”

There he was with at the mayor’s side Sunday morning, talking about four cops being shot first thing on Easter. You tell me who stands up like this on guns when somebody else has these jobs in the City of New York. You tell me why heroes in a war like this are suddenly treated like perps.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS