Newly revealed public records reveal a massive degree of noncompliance with that portion of the New York SAFE Act that requires gun owners to register their AR-style weapons.
While proponents of the law estimated it would force the registration of more than 1 million so-called assault rifles in the Empire State, officials reluctantly shared registration statistics this week that show only 44,485 guns have hit the registry. Those weapons were voluntarily registered by a mere 23,847 gun owners.
New York had declined to release its registration stats, spurning a series of FOIA requests that, unacknowledged, eventually led to a lawsuit. From the Albany Times Union:
The statistics, hidden from the public for more than a year by state officials, were given to Rochester-area lawyer Paloma Capanna on Monday in response to a lawsuit she filed on behalf of radio host Bill Robinson.
The data had been withheld by the State Police despite a flurry of requests — from members of the media as well as citizens — under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. In its rejections, the state pointed to language in the law that made the contents of the registration database exempt from public disclosure.
Capanna told the Times Union she’s “grinning from ear to ear” over the release of the data — as well as the low compliance it reflects. “Capanna called the state’s tally of fewer than 45,000 weapons a sign that the law was being ignored by many,” the paper reported.
Passage of the SAFE (Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement) Act in January 2013 prompted outrage from firearms owners and 2nd Amendment adherents across New York, with many calling for widespread civil disobedience on a number of fronts — including a mass refusal to register firearms with the state.
“Now with the figures released, it seems that drives by anti-SAFE Act gun owners last year to ‘register nothing’ and burn their registration forms may have had some effect,” Guns.com observed Tuesday.
Manhattan led the way in county registrations, with 1,640 applications filed. In neighboring Connecticut, where a similar registration requirement passed in 2013, more than 50,000 firearms branded as “assault” weapons have been registered. Although Connecticut surpasses New York in compliance, it has an estimated population of 3.6 million — compared with New York’s 19.7 million.
According to the New York Daily News, failure to register a previously owned weapon covered under the SAFE Act was classified, until April of last year, as a misdemeanor subjecting the offender to confiscation and up to one year in jail. Since that time, the same offense for owners of recently obtained firearms can now be treated under a different statute “as a low-level felony, punishable by up to four years in prison.”
The post Almost no one is complying with New York’s ‘assault weapon’ registration law appeared first on Personal Liberty.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/almost-no-one-is-complying-with-new-yorks-assault-weapon-registration-law/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/almost-no-one-is-complying-with-new-yorks-assault-weapon-registration-law/
No comments:
Post a Comment