Praise the Heroes Like Former Buffalo Police Officer Aaron Salter

BUCK: Bo in Albany, New York. Bo, what have you got for us?

CALLER: Hey, how are you? I’ll try to be quick about this. I’m up in New York state. We have the thing called the Safe Act that Governor Cuomo put in, okay, in the dark of the night, which was to make us so much more safe, okay. You can see it’s not gonna work, evil was in these people’s hearts. Okay. We have the most restrictive gun laws. Now Hochul has been talking about a magazine. It has nothing to do with it. Just like the black man that said on the news that they couldn’t edit it.

He said, “It’s not the gun; it’s the person behind the gun,” that was up there from Buffalo. Okay? They have the most restrictive gun laws. Now, I’m gonna hit this real quick. In the aspect you say how in other states you can defend somebody, stuff like that. In New York state, you have to retreat. You have to retreat before you engage anybody in your own home. There is no stand-your-ground law. There’s none in New York state! So, God forbid, someone is going after one person next to me, I have to stand back. I can’t defend them.

CLAY: Thank you for the call.

CALLER: (crosstalk)

CLAY: I’m not an expert on New York law, but I want to make sure we get this, Buck, and then I’ll let you. You probably know more about New York gun laws because you’ve tried to actually use guns and purchase them in the state before and certainly New York City is a major outlier in terms of being able to have the concealed carry permit and whatnot. I want to make sure we mention this man’s name. Aaron Salter was the Buffalo security guard, Buck, former Buffalo police officer who tried to shoot this shooter.

I believe the shooter was wearing body armor. But one of the things that I think is important is, let’s not in some way give all of the attention to the shooters in these mass-shooting events because what they want is attention. Let’s make sure that we praise the true heroes who are standing up to these shooters. In that Buffalo grocery store, that former Buffalo police officer, Aaron Salter, who was working as a security guard probably saved many lives by returning fire at the shooter and helping to focus his attention potentially on him. Now, he lost his life. But I think we need to make Aaron Salter — that name — actually well known in terms of the heroism that he showed as a security guard located in that venue.

BUCK: My understanding of self-defense statutes in New York state is that there’s a reasonableness requirement to defend yourself or others — that can expand to others — in a lethal-force situation. But the real issue is what will a prosecutor in New York do and how will a jury find. And that’s where it’s very different here than it would be in other places.

So to the point about the hero that you brought up, he’s obviously a security guard, but if somebody else — if another civilian — had tried to stop that mass shooting, in that circumstance, I think they would have obviously had everybody backing them up. But there’s usually, in the general legal sense, just a reasonable standard of use of deadly force required. But it’s not a stand-your-ground law. So there are differences state to state.