Taking full advantage of an opportunity presented by the tragedy that occurred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School late in 2012, Democrats in Connecticut and New York rammed through restrictive infringements of the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms of their citizens.
In this case, banned “assault weapons” include the common and immensely popular AR-15 type semiautomatic rifle, along with some shotguns, which the states now require be officially registered with the government.
However, gun owners in both Connecticut and New York flipped a collective bird to both governments, and very few gun owners actually complied with the laws and registered their “assault weapons.”
In fact, out of an estimated 350,000 “assault weapons” owners in Connecticut, only a few more than 40,000 actually registered.
In New York, despite an estimated one million “assault weapons” floating about the state, only about 23,000 people registered about 44,000 firearms.
The estimated numbers of “assault weapons” in the two states were not wild guesses or trumped up numbers by special interest groups and activists.
Rather, they were a “conservative estimate based upon numerous surveys, consumer purchases, NICS background check data and also private party transactions” compiled by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for firearms manufacturers.
Originally, New York refused to release the dismal numbers reflecting how few gun owners actually complied with the ridiculous law, but it was eventually compelled to do so by a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
Most of the 23,000 gun owners who registered weapons in New York were thought to be law enforcement and government officials in and around the New York City area, who were required to comply with the law in order to keep their jobs, according to Forbes.
Connecticut and New York tried to force their gun owning citizens to register their “assault weapons,” and those gun owners said NO!
Now, there are roughly 1 million gun-owning felons in New York who have proven that gun control doesn’t work, is merely an illusion of safety and represents little more than the government seeking control over individual lives and choices.