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Nick LaLota and John Avlon.
Republican 1st District U.S. Representative Nick LaLota and John Avlon, the Democratic candidate who hopes to unseat him, staked out varying positions on topics related to criminal justice and, in separate interviews in recent weeks, found scant common ground on the causes of and solutions to gun violence.
This article coincides with the third installment of “1st District Matters,” a six-part podcast by The Express News Group and WLIW-FM examining the candidates’ positions on issues of importance to residents of the 1st Congressional District.
New episodes are published each Thursday at 10 a.m. and can be heard at 27east.com, on the WLIW-FM app, and via subscription wherever you get podcasts. “1st District Matters” also is part of “Your Election 2024,” a collection of programs, series and resources from the WNET Group.
Along with affordability, safety is the top issue among his constituents, LaLota said.
“People want answers on making it more affordable here on Long Island, but also ensuring that we’re safe at the same time,” he said. “And there’s both a federal component to safety and there’s a local component to safety, and we need to get this right.”
Asked about Governor Kathy Hochul’s August announcement that the Suffolk County Police Department reported a 50 percent decline in shooting incidents with injury through July 2024, compared to the same seven-month period in 2023 — part of a statewide 29 percent decline, as reported by departments participating in the state’s Gun Involved Violence Elimination initiative — LaLota disagreed with those conclusions.
“A lot of folks are guilty of trying to manipulate statistics to their advantage,” he said, adding that “there’s a lot of fatigue” on reporting of crime. “A lot of New York citizens in particular simply don’t pick up the phone and report the crime anymore, because there’s just a fatigue to how bad it’s been.”
He was critical of New York State’s 2020 bail reform, which ended money bail and jail for most misdemeanor and lower-level felony cases, but has since seen revisions to include exceptions. He also cited the state’s Raise the Age legislation, which changed the age at which a person can be prosecuted as an adult from 16 to 18. These, he said, are the fruits of “one-party rule in New York State since 2018.”
Discretion should be returned to judges “who understand the dynamics of individual criminal defendants,” he said. “The policies that have come from Albany have indeed made us less safe, regardless of what specific statistics somebody wants to cherry-pick here or there.”
“Let’s have a fact-based debate,” Avlon said in criticizing LaLota, who is a member of the Republican Study Committee, for that group’s 2025 budget proposal that would de-fund the federal Community Oriented Police Services, or COPS, program, which provides funding to police departments across the United States.
Noting that he worked for former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani “when Rudy was sane,” Avlon said he believes in the “broken windows” theory, which holds that when a neighborhood allows physical signs of disorder to go unrepaired, it will experience more social disorder and higher crime rates.
“If people feel a sense of civic disorder and it’s not addressed, it leads to a sense of civic decay,” he said. “And that’s where people’s trust starts to decay, and civil society and democracy depends on trust. It depends on a low-crime environment.”
Public safety, he said, is “a fundamental civil right. I think Democrats need to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. We also need to speak plainly and clearly about crime trends. Here’s the fact: Violent crime rose under Donald Trump,” whom LaLota endorses, and “it’s fallen under Joe Biden.”
People’s feelings about safety, he said, “are a lagging indicator from the statistics,” and that “if people perceive shootings are up, they may feel that, but it helps to tell them [that] statistically they’re down. But that doesn’t mean you can gaslight people into saying that they’re not feeling unsafe.”
Both LaLota and Avlon pointed to illegally obtained or modified guns and the need to eliminate them. “Too many people are getting murdered in some of our nation’s biggest cities,” LaLota said, “especially because there’s too many illegal guns on the streets, and while we have a Second Amendment, the Second Amendment does not lend itself toward having illegal firearms.”
His wife is a public school teacher, LaLota said, and his three children attend school. “When you hear throughout the country there’s a mass shooting, there’s a tremendous amount of anxiety that comes into our family,” he said. “We should be respectful of the Second Amendment [and] continue to find ways to decrease or eliminate this problem.”
The federal government should fund school districts that want “resources to help make schools a harder target,” he said. “In my 11 years in the Navy, I understand that bad guys like weak targets, and we should find ways to protect our kids simultaneously.”
He also called for greater investment in mental health. “There seems to be a common profile with all these sickos who wind up shooting up schools. They all seem to fit a very similar profile. We should get better at not only offering mental health services but anticipating who all out there has the psyche to do these sick things.”
He said that he supports a ban on attachments that allow a semiautomatic rifle to fire rapidly, known as bump stocks, but opposes a ban on stabilizing braces, a firearm accessory that allows it to be fired one-handed. Both have been used in mass shootings.
The bump stock “only exists to make a nonautomatic weapon an automatic weapon,” he said. “There’s no other utility behind that,” whereas “veterans, in particular, who have been injured” need a stabilizing brace “to be able to exercise their Second Amendment rights.”
Avlon charged that LaLota “has said we should lower the age to buy AR-15s,” a term for semi-automatic rifles that has proven the weapon of choice for many mass shooters. In a 2022 radio interview, LaLota said that with respect to the age at which a person should be able to purchase such a firearm, “I would discriminate not based upon age but based upon mental capacity.” Asked if a “mentally healthy 18-year-old should be able to buy one,” he answered affirmatively.
“Does that sound like common sense to you?” Avlon asked. “That’s a problem if we want to stop mass shootings. … This is totally consistent with the Second Amendment, but we need to focus on gun safety and violence prevention. Let’s talk about the things we can agree on. Let’s make progress on those areas. But there’s nothing that’s common-sense about lowering the age to buy AR-15s.”
Federal law requires a person to be 21 to purchase a handgun from a licensed firearm dealer, but 18 to buy a long gun from a dealer.
Next week, the candidates will discuss women’s rights.
