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One of Kathy Hochul’s rivals in the New York gubernatorial race has released an ad highlighting an endorsement the sitting governor once received from the National Rifle Association.
Tom Suozzi, a centrist New York congressman looking to unseat Hochul in the June 28 Democratic primary, claims she has stood by as gun violence ravages the state, citing the New York City subway killing of Daniel Enriquez and the death of an 11-year-old girl in the Bronx earlier this month.
“Subway shootings, guns flooding our streets, losing children, losing parents, and a governor who voted with the NRA in Congress and has done nothing on crime,” Suozzi says in the 30-second spot, part of a half-million-dollar television ad campaign.
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Released over the holiday weekend, the ad comes as Hochul and New York lawmakers work to pass a series of gun control measures before the end of the legislative session Thursday and days after Hochul’s campaign reported raising more than $10 million from mid-January to late May, almost three times as much as what Suozzi brought in over the same time frame.
Hochul, who replaced Andrew Cuomo in the governor’s mansion last August after nearly eight years as the lieutenant governor, has made a dramatic shift to the left on gun control since 2012, the year she earned an endorsement from the NRA during her failed bid to represent New York’s right-leaning 27th District in the House.
The ad plays a clip of Hochul, then a first-term member of Congress with an “A” rating from the NRA, touting the endorsement.
Suozzi, who trails Hochul in the polls by more than 30 points, has repeatedly brought up the NRA endorsement in the weeks following a racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo.
“I don’t know why people aren’t talking about that and why she hasn’t addressed that,” Suozzi said. “Hochul is talking about how Congress did not act in 2012, and she was in Congress right around that time, and she was endorsed by the NRA. It’s really the height of hypocrisy.”
When asked about her congressional voting record on gun rights, Hochul dismissed the criticisms of her opponent.
“This is not the time to talk about that,” the governor said in a May 18 press briefing. “I will tell you what I’m doing right now as governor of the state of New York. There will be no state that has tougher, more thoughtful policies, practices, and laws in place in response to not just what happened in Buffalo, New York, but what is happening every single day in the streets of places like Rochester, Syracuse, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem, and everywhere else where I have gone for eight years as lieutenant governor to countless funerals.”
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Hochul has called for stricter gun control measures in the wake of the Buffalo massacre and another mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers last week.
The New York governor announced Tuesday that she and Democratic leadership in the state legislature had come to an agreement on a slate of gun control measures in response to the shootings. The bills would raise the minimum age to purchase a semi-automatic firearm from 18 to 21, ban ordinary civilians from buying body armor, and tighten red flag laws in the state.
