Gun group threatens primaries against Senate Republicans – Senate Republicans’ pick of a leader who voted in support of the controversial gun-control law in 2013 is not sitting well with gun-right groups, and the state’s leading gun group said it would consider primaries next year against GOP senators if they don’t seek changes to the law. Gun-rights groups aggressively sought to sway senators to back Sen. John DeFrancisco, R-Syracuse, who voted against the SAFE Act. But the majority of the Republican conference picked Sen. John Flanagan, R-Suffolk County, who voted for the law. “If they really cared about the core constituency of the Second Amendment people, they wouldn’t have elected someone like that,” Thomas King, the president of the state Rifle and Pistol Association, told Gannett’s Albany Bureau today. “How can we possibly support an institution that is being run by someone who voted for the SAFE Act, which was probably the most draconian piece of legislation to affect the Second Amendment in New York state in our lifetime?”