The standoff between 80,000-100,000 gun owners who refuse to register their arms and a state government that simply doesn’t have the manpower, firepower, prison space or hospital space to enforce their ban continues in Connecticut. For the moment, the government of Governor Malloy is wisely engaged in ignoring the enforcement of Constitution State’s blatantly unconstitutional gun law, as the politicians who voted it allegedly lobby for protective details.

Just to the west, a similar problem is brewing, on a much larger scale.

New Yorkers are required by the so-called “assault weapon” ban provisions of the New York SAFE Act to register applicable firearms by April 15. At least one million firearms are thought to be affected by the ban, and likely belong to more than 300,000 New Yorkers.

How many of these firearms have been registered?

Bearing Arms attempted to find out today how many of the so-called “assault weapons” belonging to New Yorkers had been registered with the State Police, and received this curt reply.

The State Police cannot release information related to the registration of weapons including the number of weapons registered. Those records you seek are derived from information collected for the State Police database and are, therefore, exempt from disclosure.

We don’t know, and we can’t know, thanks to a provision hidden within the hastily passed NY SAFE Act. There is no legitimate policy reason for hiding this data. It is simply just another part of NY SAFE that Governor Andrew Cuomo wanted hidden from public view.

If New Yorkers are anything like their brethren in Connecticut and less than 15-percent register their arms, the deadline will pass with 850,000 qualifying firearms still “undocumented.” Considering the widespread and vocal opposition to the NY SAFE Act among law enforcement, including outright refusals to enforce the law by many New York Sheriffs, noncompliance will likely be even higher, approaching or exceeding 90-percent.

It will be interesting to see how loud-mouthed but largely impotent Governor Andrew Cuomo responds to the expected widespread non-compliance. As Assemblyman Bill Nojay (R-Pittsford) noted earlier this year:

“The rank and file troopers don’t want anything to do with it,” Assemblyman Bill Nojay (R-Pittsford) said Monday. “I don’t know of a single sheriff upstate who is going to enforce it.”

“If you don’t have the troopers and you don’t have the sheriffs, who have you got? You’ve got Andrew Cuomo pounding on the table in Albany,” Nojay said.

It it all but certain that non-compliance is going to be even higher in New York that it is in Connecticut, and there is even less that Governor Cuomo can do about at with law enforcement agencies being unwilling to enforce a law that they feel is blatantly unconstitutional.

At this point, hiding just how bad his failure is might be the bright spot of Coumo’s blatantly unconstitutional, widely ignored law.