Nick Brzezniak, left, chairman of the Erie County Chapter of Shooters Committee on Political Education, or SCOPE, and Dominic Nappo target practice in Alleghany County on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022.
Nearly a decade after starting a registry to track assault weapons, New York officials are no closer to knowing how many of those guns are circulating in the state.
More than 40% of owners of assault weapons who registered their firearms with New York State Police under a new state law failed to recertify the guns five years later as the law requires.
The 2013 New York Safe Act banned the sale of assault weapons and required anyone who owned such guns to register them with state police – an effort aimed at helping law enforcement solve crimes and prosecute criminals. The provisions were among the most controversial of a slew of new measures to reduce gun violence in the wake of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
The Safe Act defined assault weapons as semi-automatics capable of accepting detachable magazines and with a military-style feature that could include protruding pistol grips, folding stocks, thumb hole stocks, a second hand grip, bayonet mount or flash suppressor.
By 2015, 23,847 people applied to register 44,485 assault weapons – believed to be a small fraction of the total number of assault weapons in the state.
Many gun owners scoffed at the law, and some county sheriffs, including in Erie County, said they would not enforce it.
Compliance appears to have gotten worse. While the Safe Act also required assault weapon owners to re-register their guns every five years, just 14,056 residents have submitted applications for recertification, according to a state police spokesman.
Police agencies across the state have lodged 435 felony charges against individuals for failing to register an assault weapon since the law went into effect in 2013, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.
The Safe Act, nearing its 10th anniversary, illustrates how difficult it is to implement new gun control measures, even in a state that already has plenty of them.
Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a series of new gun laws this summer in response to a mass shooting at a Tops on Jefferson Avenue and at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, as well a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down parts of New York’s longstanding law on carrying concealed weapons.
Among the measures: a new permit process for the purchase of semi-automatic rifles, which remain legal if they do not have the military-style features specified by the Safe Act.
Gun rights advocates decried the new laws as knee-jerk bureaucracy that will do little to keep criminals from getting guns or make people safer. The new concealed carry law already is being challenged in court.
“Anyone that wants to get a gun is going to get a gun anyways. And it’s not going to be legal and they’re going to be able to do whatever they want to do,” said Nick Brzezniak, chairman of the Erie County Chapter of Shooters Committee on Political Education, or SCOPE.
Research: Laws make NY safer
But data from the Centers for Disease Control suggests New York’s tight firearms laws make the state safer, relative to most other states, when it comes to gun-related violence.
In 2020, New York had fewer gun deaths per 100,000 residents than all but four other states, and its gun death rate was 61% lower than the national average, according to Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Even before adopting its latest gun laws, New York was rated sixth-best state in the country in “gun safety strength” by the Giffords Center, which supports stronger gun control laws.
At the other end of the spectrum was Mississippi, which had 28.6 gun deaths per 100,000, a rate that was 110% higher than the national average. Giffords Law rated Mississippi among the five worst in the country for gun safety strength and noted that the state loosened restrictions further in 2021 by allowing people to carry concealed firearms using a driver’s license that never expires.
New York’s strong gun regulations clearly have an impact on deterring gun crimes and violence, said Robert J. Spitzer, author of five books on gun control and gun policy, including “The Gun Dilemma: How History is Against Expanded Gun Rights,” published this month.
It’s difficult to measure the precise impact of a specific law on the wrongful uses of guns, but laws are in place to prosecute those who break them and deter people who fear being caught and prosecuted, said Spitzer, distinguished service professor emeritus at State University of New York College at Cortland.
Between 75% and 90% of guns seized by police in New York investigating crimes come from outside the state – another good indicator that New York’s laws “make a difference,” said Spitzer.
“If it was just as easy to get a gun in New York as outside the state, people would just get those guns in New York State, because you don’t have to travel or travel as far,” he said.
In addition to the registration system, the Safe Act banned the sale of high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic guns with military features.
But gun manufacturers introduced new models of guns in New York that functioned the same as the banned weapons, except with enough cosmetic changes to fall outside the ban.
People gathered for a moment of silence at the Tops market on Jefferson Avenue Thursday, July 14, 2022, marking two months since a mass shooting claimed the lives 10 people.
Ban didn't prevent Buffalo mass shooting
The Safe Act's ban on the sale of assault weapons did not stop a Broome County man from legally buying a Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic rifle from an Endicott gun store and then allegedly using the weapon in a racist attack at a Tops in Buffalo on May 14. Payton Gendron, 19, of Conklin was charged with killing 10 people in Buffalo's deadliest mass shooting.
The gun he is accused of using complied with the Safe Act requirements at the time of purchase, according to the store’s owner.
A photo of an AR-15 assault rifle with the names of three mass shooters handwritten on its stock that was posted on a discord.com account by Payton Gendron, the man accused of shooting 13 people in a Tops Markets store in Buffalo, killing 10 of them, on May 14, 2022. The gun was the one Gendron is accused of using in the shooting.
A previous owner of the gun had modified the rifle to limit the magazine to 10 rounds so that it adhered to the state law, according to a racist diatribe that Gendron wrote prior to the attack. Gendron used his father’s power drill to undo that modification and return the weapon to being what he described as a “military grade assault rifle” – the same type of gun a 20-year-old man used to kill 26 people a decade ago at Sandy Hook.
Gun registries have the potential to help police identify violent criminals and to protect officers responding at a scene where guns might be present. Advocates for registration systems also say they make firearm owners more accountable and discourage illegal sales of guns.
But few states have registries, and some states have banned them as an infringement on gun owners’ freedoms.
How many assault weapons are in NY?
In New York, even with a registry in place for nearly a decade, it’s still not clear how many assault weapons are circulating statewide.
A gun trade group estimated in 2015 that a million guns in New York fell into the state's definition of assault weapons, but Spitzer said he believes that number is wildly inflated, given the low gun ownership rates of New Yorkers compared to Americans in other states.
“It’s just not a number that anybody tracks,” he said.
Gov. Hochul's office declined to comment on questions from The News about the Safe Act, the number of assault weapons in the state, and levels of compliance with the assault weapon registration requirement. Hochul was in U.S. Congress at the time the Safe Act was adopted and didn't start as lieutenant governor for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo until 2015.
“Governor Hochul's top priority is to keep New Yorkers safe, and she worked with the legislature and national experts to enact landmark gun legislation that expanded red flag laws, raised the age for purchasing semi-automatic rifles, and carefully regulates concealed carry permits to protect New Yorkers and respect responsible, legal gun ownership," spokeswoman Janine Kava said in an emailed statement.
Nationwide, the number of firearms has continued to proliferate and is now estimated at more than 400 million, and gun violence shot up dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Gun violence prevention experts said more stringent efforts at the state level to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people can help.
“There’s plenty of work in firearm policy to be done,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency room physician and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California Davis.
Most of the country, for example, still allows people with a history of violent crimes to purchase firearms, even though research shows that people with misdemeanor records of crimes such as assault, battery and brandishing firearms are “at hugely increased risk of committing violent crime, relative to other gun owners,” said Wintemute.
And when California began prohibiting people with violent pasts from buying guns, the risk “went way down" in that state.
“In most of the country, it’s a myth that you can’t buy a gun if you’ve been convicted of a violent crime. That only actually applies if the crime is a felony or if it invokes domestic violence,” he said.
Extreme risk protection orders, also known as red flag laws, have shown to be effective, especially in preventing suicide deaths, said Wintemute. And in California, in 59 cases where an extreme risk protection order was used for a potential mass shooter, none of the cases so far has resulted in a mass shooting, he said.
“When a tip is given and acted on, the best evidence we have is that they’re very effective,” said Wintemute.
Research out of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions also shows that permitting and licensing laws “are among the most effective policies at reducing multiple forms of gun violence,” and yet just nine states have permit-to-purchase laws, said Cassandra Crifasi, associate professor at Johns Hopkins who studies gun policy and gun violence prevention.
The center’s research found lower rates of firearm homicides, fewer guns diverted for use in crimes, lower rates of firearm suicide, lower incidences of mass shootings and fewer law enforcement officers shot in the line of duty in states that have permit policies.
In 2007, Missouri repealed a handgun purchaser licensing law that had dated back to the 1920s. Researchers at Johns Hopkins estimate the change led to an additional 49 to 68 firearm homicides per year in the state from 2008 to 2012 and a 23% increase in the state’s firearm suicide rate.
New York has gone in the opposite direction, adding a new permit-to-purchase requirement for semi-automatic rifles that took effect in September and reworking its concealed-carry permit process to comply with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down parts of its old concealed-carry law.
Brzezniak worries the changes, which prohibit even people with concealed-carry permits from having their guns within safe zones such as schools, churches and public buildings, will make New Yorkers less safe.
“Listen, if I was a criminal, I’d want to go into a gun-free zone, knowing that there’s a lot of people that aren’t going to be carrying anymore,” he said.
Brzezniak, who has had a concealed-carry permit for many years, said he already has avoided going to some places, either because he had a gun with him or didn’t feel comfortable being in a gun-free zone without his firearm.
“I have friends that say, ‘You know what, I’m going to protect myself or my family, no matter what and I’m still carrying my gun and I’ll deal with it later,” he said. “That’s not really the answer either. I do believe in following the laws.”
Still, he added, the new laws are “totally wrong and we have to keep fighting to make them right, for the safety of everybody.”
Wintemute, the California emergency room physician, acknowledged that gun regulations can only go so far in helping curb violence and crime.
“Particularly in a place like California and in New York, where there are lots of policies in place already, we need to recognize that there are limits to the inroads we will make preventing gun violence if all we do is work on guns. We need also to work on the social factors that make violence seem necessary or useful,” he said.
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Though the Safe Act did not prevent the May 14 horror, it stopped other violence from happening and kept guns out of the hands of enough dangerous people to maintain New York’s gun death statistics on the lower side.
Both sides in the case had been scheduled to appear in court on Thursday afternoon, but the Erie County District Attorney's Office on Monday announced the case had been adjourned until Jan. 12.
Experts estimate there are now 400 million firearms in civilian hands in the U.S. – more guns than people.
Gov. Kathy Hochul will work with the State Legislature to amend a law she just signed that restricts the purchase of soft body armor by citizens to make sure it prevents them from buying the type of hard body armor plates that a gunman wore while killing 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket, her staff said Sunday.
Legislation passed and expected to be signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul by the end of this week will raise the age to buy a semi-automatic rifle in New York to 21 and require a firearms license to do so.
State Attorney General Letitia James announced on Wednesday that she has ordered nine Western New York businesses to immediately stop advertising and selling parts that are used to build homemade, untraceable “ghost guns.”
Nick Brzezniak, left, chairman of the Erie County Chapter of Shooters Committee on Political Education, or SCOPE, and Dominic Nappo target practice in Alleghany County on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022.
People gathered for a moment of silence at the Tops market on Jefferson Avenue Thursday, July 14, 2022, marking two months since a mass shooting claimed the lives 10 people.
A photo of an AR-15 assault rifle with the names of three mass shooters handwritten on its stock that was posted on a discord.com account by Payton Gendron, the man accused of shooting 13 people in a Tops Markets store in Buffalo, killing 10 of them, on May 14, 2022. The gun was the one Gendron is accused of using in the shooting.
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