Ray Kelly Calls Out Obama On Gun Control, Takes Jab At Stop-And-Frisk Critics

Ray Kelly responded Sunday to the accidental shooting of a 5-year-old girl in the Bronx, taking President Barack Obama to task for his lack of action on gun control.

“We can never accept the shooting of a child as a part of city life,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said, according to The New York Daily News, referring to Hailey Dominguez, the little girl shot by a stray bullet in Tremont. Dominguez, the latest child victim of gun violence in New York City, is listed in critical but stable condition.

“We can never accept the notion that somehow children are going to be a part of the casualty count, whether somebody else is targeted or not,” Kelly said, adding, "Children are not supposed to be collateral damage.”

And when asked what he heard from Obama and Romney about gun control during the campaign, Kelly remarked, "Maybe the city most affected (by guns) is Chicago. The President’s hometown. But barely a peep out of him.”

Kelly, of course, is a close ally of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's. Bloomberg, who heads the Mayor's Alliance Against Illegal Guns, was outspoken this year on the need for a national conversation about gun control, especially during election season.

Two weeks after the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, Bloomberg told The Huffington Post, "There's 34 people killed every single day [nationwide]. We've killed more than 400,000 Americans since 1968, when RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. That is more Americans than died during WWII. So the argument that we can do with existing laws and stop this is just preposterous. It isn't worth having a discussion about."

When it comes to battling gun violence in New York City, however, both Bloomberg and Kelly have received harsh criticism for their steadfast support of NYPD stop-and-frisks.

"Yeah, maybe we should adopt policies from other cities that don’t work," Kelly quipped sarcastically, according to The Daily News.

The correlation, however, between decreased gun violence and increased stop-and-frisks, is tenuous.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Mitt Romney said, "Maybe the city most affected (by guns) is Chicago. The President’s hometown. But barely a peep out of him.” In fact, it was Ray Kelly who said this.