Every North Country lawmaker, including the region’s lone Democrat, voted against raising the age to purchase a semi-automatic rifle in New York from 18 to 21.

The legislation, along with nine other gun control bills, was signed into law this week.

Semi-automatic rifles have become synonymous with mass shootings in the last decade. It’s what one shooter used in 2012 to kill 26 elementary students and staff in Sandy Hook, Connecticut and another shooter used in 2018 to kill 17 students and school staff in Parkland, Florida.

AR-15s were used by the gunmen in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting that killed 58 people and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub that left 48 dead.

It’s also what the shooter used to kill 10 Black people in Buffalo last month and another gunman used to kill 19 school children and two teachers in Texas just weeks ago.

“I have a third-grader in school, so I think I feel like everybody else does — frustrated and disappointed,” said Assemblyman Billy Jones, a Democrat from Clinton County.

Jones says he’s frustrated the federal government hasn’t moved to strengthen red flag laws and background checks.

But when it came to the package of gun control measures in New York, Jones voted against four out of ten of the bills, including raising the age to buy a semi-automatic rifle.

Jones says he would have voted for it, except it also contained language that requires owners of semiautomatic rifles to get a permit for those guns and recertify those permits every five years.

“I don’t know how the conversation starts out with limiting AR-15 style rifles from 18 to 21 to now everyone having to put a pistol-style permit on their hunting rifles.”

Jones also joined Republicans in voting against a bill that requires semiautomatic rifles made or sold in New York to have ammunition that can be microstamped, allowing law enforcement to more easily trace the ammunition back to the gun owner.

“Until we can get together in the middle ground in this country and work together to solve these issues, we’re never going to solve this,” said Jones. “We are never going to.”

NCPR reached out to North Country Republican Senators Dan Stec, Joe Griffo, and Patty Ritchie as well as Republican Assemblymembers Matt Simpson, Mark Walczyk, Robert Smullen and Ken Blankenbush. All either didn’t respond to an interview request or declined an interview.

Blankenbush sent a statement criticizing the legislation, saying that it did little to address what he sees as the root cause of many shootings — mental health. Experts, though, say the most effective measures to reduce gun violence include raising the age for gun ownership as well as universal background checks.

Assemblyman Blankenbush was also critical of the process of passing the legislation, writing that it “was not an earnest attempt at fixing things, rather it was a chance for Majority members to get sound bites for their re-election campaigns.”

Those North Country Republicans, along with many others around the state, did cross the aisle and vote for two of the ten gun bills. The first establishes a task force on social media and violent extremism and requires the task force on domestic terrorism to report its findings to the Attorney General.

Senator Patty Richie also joined Democrats including Assemblyman Billy Jones on a bill that outlaws the sale of body armor to most citizens.