Let's use New York's laughably mis-named "SAFE" Act as a textbook example.
SCOPE (Shooters Committee On Political Education) has been trying like the devil to pry any information out of the Cuomo administration that it can and has been, until very recently, stymied by an iron curtain of secrecy:
Asking the State for any information about the SAFE Act is an exercise in frustration. SCOPE had to go to court and through the entire appeals process just to force the State police to release the raw numbers for “assault weapons” registrations. I’ve experienced similar battles myself. When attempting to find out how many owners have had their guns confiscated since the law took effect, I filed three different FOIA requests with the State and had to appeal each one. At the end of the appeals process I was still informed that “no records suitable to your inquiry are available.” To this day we still only have ballpark estimates because New York is doing all of this under the covers and keeping the press in the dark as much as they possibly can.
Now what can explain this hardcore opacity other than that the Cuomo administration is doing things besides and beyond the "SAFE" Act's ostensible public selling points? Like, for example, outright gun confiscation without due process or even the tiniest fig leaf of quasi-legality?
This is why SCOPE went balls-to-the-wall to tear any bit of useful information out of the iron-fisted grip of Albany. And what they found just reinforces the paradigm:
About 44,500 assault weapons have been registered in New York since a new gun-control law was enacted in 2013, records released by State Police to a gun-rights group this week showed.
The Shooters Committee On Public Education, a gun-rights group based in western New York, successfully sued after the State refused to release the details. Now the group claimed that the statistics showed what they suspected: Few gun owners are complying with the SAFE Act adopted by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State Legislature in January 2013.
The total number of applications to register assault weapons in New York was 25,536.
“The majority of gun owners and sportsmen in New York have absolutely no respect for this law,” said Stephen Aldstadt, the group’s president.
The group said that estimates have showed that there about a million assault weapons in New York, so if that’s the case, about 4% were registered as required under the SAFE Act. But gun-control advocates said there is no way of knowing how many assault weapons exist in New York. [emphasis added]
Yes, "assault weapon" is a meaningless scare term dreamed up by gun-grabbers to demonize all firearms and their owners. But let's not lose our focus here. The Left wants to confiscate all guns and illegally gut the Second Amendment without repealing it through the Article V amendment process, at which they could never succeed. But as long as public compliance with SAFE is voluntary, gun-owners, knowing that said compliance would amount to being disarmed and arrested and incarcerated with them having to do all the State's work and paperwork in order to turn themselves in, are choosing not to comply by a 24-1 margin. Small wonder that "gun-control advocates" don't want a specific number attached to "assault weapons"; if kept vague, it puts no ceiling upon how many guns can be confiscated, and it hides the impotence and ineffectiveness of the "SAFE" Act.
But this also illustrates the gun-grabber endgame, because to attain their goal of a gun-free country (outside of all levels of government), compliance cannot be voluntary. It must be compulsory. And that can only happen by the advent and imposition of a full-scale totalitarian police state. Something that Americans appear to instinctively realize, which helps explain why gun control is one of the few issues on which the Left has been unable to buffalo and bamboozle the American people.
There is, however, no reason to think that leftwingnuts won't resort that that very extremist endgame to get what they want, just as soon as they can finagle a way to do so quickly, without the public realizing what's happening. After which it'll be too late.
Doesn't seem overly likely, if you ask me. If the Dylann Roof atrocity couldn't fuel a gun-confiscation drive for longer than forty-eight hours, it's difficult to imagine what would.
So I think we're "SAFE" - at least for now.
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