General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Connecticut has very likely created tens of thousands of newly minted criminals; 20-100k at least [View all]Shamash
(597 posts)The OP did say it best. People who had not broken any laws nor harmed anyone by doing nothing, are now by continuing to do nothing, guilty of a felony. Not sure why anyone thought that was a good idea. Was there some precedent where that sort of thing worked out well?
Worse, how are you going to enforce it? If they are unregistered, you do not know who has them, so the only way they will surface is if they are used in a crime or there is an accident or negligence that can be traced back to one. Even if the police had gun store records to track original purchasers, that purchaser could simply say "I sold it a while ago" and there would be no way to disprove this nor is it probable cause to get a search warrant, and any jurisdiction that tried it would have the ACLU all over their case, standing side-by-side with the NRA on the issue (stranger things have happened).
For criminals who would not have registered them anyway, this is not going to change anything. For everyone else, the rate of misuse of this type is less than 1 in 1000 over the lifetime of the weapon, so over the next 100 years we could reasonably expect to see no more than 350 of those 350 thousand unregistered weapons get pulled out of circulation by being exposed in this way.
Not a very smart law on the whole, as well as being so badly written that it considers possession of plastic accessories to be legally equivalent to possession of a fully working assault weapon (with mandatory jail time measured in years).