Raise the Age: Albany’s Recipe for Even More Armed Teens

Every day brings more evidence that New York’s raising age law has been a disaster not only for the city and state, but also for the young people it supposedly protects.

The 17-year-old boy was shot four times outside a high school on the Upper West Side on Tuesday.

The alleged perpetrator, 19-year-old Cheick Coulibaly, was released on bail in an armed robbery case in 2021.

Later that day — in what police said may have been revenge — a shooting occurred in East Harlem. another child wounded by bullets nearby another school, Harlem Renaissance HS.

These bloody tragedies are simply the latest fruit of poisonous progressive politics. Gangs are luring more teenagers into violent lives, knowing full well that their age serves as a shield for real consequences.

That’s why the number of teen shooters And The death toll has tripled since 2017, when the Raise the Age program went into effect. In the first eight months of 2017, 36 teenagers were killed in shootings; for the same period in 2022. 111.

Meanwhile, the age at which children first take up arms has plummeted from 16-17 to 12-13.

Let it soak in.

Because left-wing Democrats have codified their policing morality into state law, children are armed when they reach puberty.

As part of Raise the Age, teen shooters typically get cookies and juice from our chronically unlucky family court (where juvenile cases will almost certainly be tried) and then hit the road.

Certainly Teen violence is on the rise: it’s no surprise that the alleged perpetrator Koulibaly was walking free when he should have been behind bars.

Raise the Age had a noble enough goal: not to sentence children who make stupid mistakes to overly harsh prison terms.

But in practice, it was a real disaster, creating deadly situations for the very groups she was supposed to protect.

Yes, there are other factors. New York’s COVID policy disrupted public life for two years.

The city’s traditional public schools tend to fall short of educating the most needy children. And family structures and mores have been destroyed for decades.

But Raise the Age reinforces all of these trends, and even Albany is not up to the task of correcting this.