The New York Way

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg rules with the proverbial iron fist, and at the state level Mario Cuomo campaigns in New York City and largely ignores the rest of the state. Coming up Jan 9, Mr. Cuomo will be giving his state of the state address in which he tells the legislature what he expects in the upcoming session.

The fly in this ointment is that not all the legislators come from NYC and Buffalo, so he may not get it. One of the things he's contemplating is more gun laws:

Cuomo continued, “Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option — keep your gun but permit it.”

So the options are
1. Turn 'em in, no compensation.
2. Turn em in, and we'll give you something.
3. Register your guns and pay the annual protection money and we'll know where to find them when we return to 1.

One supposes this will be the model for proposed gun legislation here in Colorado.

Update: And how well does that work in practice?

But plenty of New Yorkers have chosen to own guns outside the official system. In a city that, as I write, has roughly 37,000 licensed handgun owners and about 21,000 rifle and shotgun licenses, the running guesstimate of illegal firearms stands at two million, give or take a bit. That’s the number the U.S. Department of Justice has used in its official publications in recent years.

Bad laws do not produce good results. They produce contempt.From the same piese:

Whatever the motivation, Kopel found no more than one percent compliance with Denver’s law requiring registration of semi-automatic weapons, as well as Boston's and Cleveland’s bans on such guns.

Ominous update: Not only are people buying everything, even is fairly solidly blue districts, they aren't very interested in the burial tubes.