In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, New York State passed the SAFE Act, which mandated that owners of assault weapons — a category that includes a selection of semi-automatic firearms — register their guns with the state government. The registration period ended more than a year ago, and tallies indicate that the vast majority of New Yorkers simply ignored the requirement: Fewer than 50,000 out of an estimated 1 million assault weapons have been registered.
These guns are owned by about a million people — probably generally law-abiding people who are now technically felons. And they're actually in good company: As legal scholar Douglas Husak has noted, there are more than 3,000 crimes and 300,000 regulations that can be enforced through criminal punishment at the federal level. That's not even counting state laws, like the SAFE Act, which combine with federal code to make basically all of us felons.
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