Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - New York Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke Wednesday on the gun violence epidemic in response to the tragic mass shootings that have plagued the nation this month.
"We will never become immune to this or desensitized to it, because that is when we start losing the battle," said Gov. Hochul. "We must harness that outrage and that anger and disgust, that there could be someone with such evil in their heart that they would acquire an AR-15, go to a schoolyard after shooting their own grandmother and opening up on innocent teachers and children."
Hochul says she wants New York State Police to do daily check-ins on students of the schools for the peace and mind of the parents.
"We convened an emergency meeting this morning of the State Police and I said, 'Are we doing everything possible?' I said, 'I want State Police patrols visiting our schools, doing daily check-ins every single day from today to the end of the school year,'" she said.
Gov. Hochul highlighted the work of the Interstate Task Force to get ghost guns of the street.
"I'm proud of the work our Interstate Task Force has already done to date. As a result of this intentional aggressive approach, we are now seizing more than 60% more guns per-month than we had in the past," the Governor said.
"We took action against the ghost guns, and as we finally now banned them, I was proud to sign a law to make them illegal here in the State of New York. We are now seizing many, many of these guns, as well. We've seized over 348 total statewide."
In addition to the continued efforts of the task force seizing guns on the state borders, Hochul is pushing for more legislation to be passed.
"I want a law change that requires all New York State law enforcement agencies to report the recovery of any gun to our State Agency Police Clearinghouse within 24 hours," Hochul said. "Enter that into a National Crime Information Center, submit the information to the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network and see if it's been used in past crimes. That'll help our efforts.
"We want to build change so we require microstamping on all semi-automatic pistols. What does that do? It creates a fingerprint on the bullets, an incredible tool to help our law enforcement share information when they identify bullets, guns that have been used in other crimes."
Hochul also mentions raising the age to possess a firearm in the state.
"How does an 18-year-old purchase an AR-15 in the State of New York, State of Texas? That person's not old enough to buy a legal drink. I want to work with the legislature to change that," Hochul said. "I want it to be 21. I think that's just common sense, because as we've just seen for the two horrific crimes that we can't get out of our minds, what happened in Buffalo, what happened in a school, children in Texas? The common denominator, there are three, the weapon was an AR-15. The perpetrator was a male and the age of the perpetrator was 18."
You can listen to Hochul's entire briefing in the player below: