The strange birth of NY’s gun laws – Recent months have seen a former Marine from Indiana, a Tea Party activist from California and a nurse from Tennessee all arrested and charged in New York City for possession of firearms they had legal permits to carry back home. All were “nabbed” when they naively sought to check the weapon with security. These innocents fell afoul of the nation’s toughest gun laws. But few New Yorkers know how those laws came to be. The father of New York gun control was Democratic city pol “Big Tim “Sullivan — a state senator and Tammany Hall crook, a criminal overseer of the gangs of New York.