After a deranged 20-year-old brought unthinkable evil to Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012, both Connecticut and New York banned the sale of semiautomatic firearms they deem to be "assault weapons" and required owners of these guns to register them with the state.

When the deadline for gun owners to register their "assault weapons" in Connecticut expired on December 31, 2013, Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance said he received 41,347 applications to register "assault weapons." (I put "assault weapon" in quotes because the only way to define the term is according to what a particular gun-control law decides it means.) There was no process for registering the guns late, so any gun owner in Connecticut with an "assault weapon" had become a potential felon as of January 1, 2014.

This caused the media to wonder how many gun owners didn't register their politically incorrect guns. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, said at the time that it estimated there were likely 350,000 residents of Connecticut who had banned "assault weapons" as of late 2013. The media ran with this. Headlines announced that more than 300,000 residents of Connecticut opted not to register their "assault weapons."

Many then asked New York State how many gun owners had registered their "assault weapons" by the April 2014 deadline set by New York's SAFE Act (the SAFE Act also considers some shotguns to be "assault weapons"). New York State refused to answer the question, but the NSSF said it estimates that about one million residents of New York State had so-called "assault weapons" at the time of the ban.