The December 31 deadline for complying with Connecticut’s new “assault weapons” registration requirement is long past, but estimates show “as little as 15 percent of the rifles classified as assault weapons owned by Connecticut residents were registered.”
The Courant reports that this means thousands of Connecticut gun owners were committing Class D felonies on January 1. Estimates for the number of owners of “assault weapons” in this position range between 20,000 and 100,000.
State Senator Tony Guglielmo (R-Stafford) responded to the dearth of registrations: “I honestly thought from my own standpoint that the vast majority would register.” He then added, “If you pass laws that people have no respect for and they don’t follow them, then you have a real problem.”
There is no clear indicator for how many ignored registration out of civil disobedience versus how many simply failed to register out of ignorance of the new law’s requirements.
Either way, Mike Lawlor of Connecticut’s Office of Policy and Management says the law has not failed. Rather, because all the unregistered guns are “now illegal,” they are out of circulation, and “the goal [was] to have fewer of these types of weapons in circulation.”
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