MADNESS IN NEW YORK – OR AS MARK TWAIN SAID, "I REPEAT MYSELF" – AT 8:01 A.M. ET:  New York State is almost bankrupt.  More people are leaving New York than any other state.  Ultra-establishmentarian Andy Cuomo, son of a three-term governor, is running for his father's job as an outsider, and the GOP can't find candidates for the Senate or governorship in a Republican year.

Now, you would think, with all this, that New York politicians would get serious.  Are you kidding?  Why get serious when there's a race card to be played?  Consider this dribble:

City cops are livid over a legislative proposal that could handcuff the brave officers involved in life-and-death confrontations every day -- requiring them to shoot gun-wielding suspects in the arm or leg rather than shoot to kill, The Post has learned.

The "minimum force" bill, which surfaced in the Assembly last week, seeks to amend the state penal codes' "justification" clause that allows an officer the right to kill a thug if he feels his life or someone else's is in imminent danger.

The bill -- drafted in the wake of Sean Bell's controversial police shooting death -- would force officers to use their weapons "with the intent to stop, rather than kill" a suspect. They would be mandated to "shoot a suspect in the arm or the leg."Under present NYPD training, cops are taught to shoot at the center of their target and fire their weapon until the threat has been stopped.

Explanation:  The "controversial" police shooting death of one Sean Bell was controversial only in the eyes of the left.  Mr. Bell was killed fleeing arrest and aiming his car at police officers, an unhealthy act characterized by a lack of sportsmanship.

"These are split-second, spontaneous events -- and officers have to make a full assessment in a fraction of a second," said an angry Michael Paladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association. "It is not realistic, and it exists only in cartoons.

"It's moronic and would create two sets of rules in the streets if there is a gunfight. This legislation would require officers to literally shoot the gun out of someone's hand or shoot to wound them in the leg or arm. I don't know of any criminal who doesn't shoot to kill. They are not bound by any restrictions."

"The legislators have their heads buried in the sand, and we would not be able to fully protect the public or ourselves."

In fact, NYPD officers and detectives hit their targets only 17 percent of the time because of the incredibly stressful circumstances surrounding a shooting.

COMMENT:  Welcome back to the 1960s.  Ever since the election of Barack Obama, the sixties crowd has wallowed in a kind of nostalgia for the whacked-out "ideas" of that era, this being one of them.

In fact, police killings of citizens are rare in New York, and are almost always justified.  But attacked the cops – all cops – is so sixtyish.  Ah, wasn't it a time.

This legislation will likely go nowhere in its current form.  But an alternative bill, with language that only a tort lawyer could love, may well emerge.

May 25, 2010