The NY State police? The NYS Attorney General's office? Who???

Thanks.  

I call the state police because they are the ones who are going to pick you up if anything goes down.

Wrote the Syracuse AG once, never got a reply.

AFAIK there is no agency that can/will help you.

AFAIK there is no agency that can/will help you.

Untrue. Call the ATF in either Albany or look up your local branch. They have agents available who will answer your questions and even look up info on state laws for you. I've done this several times and I've always gotten a response within a few days.

Send Elliot Spitzer a dozen roses with your question on the card and I'm sure he will respond.  NOT!

There is no agency that should give you legal advice, nor should you rely on any.  The attorney general is not your lawyer, he is the state's lawyer.  The state and local police are not lawyers and in any event are charged with enforcement of the law, not interpretation.

The last thing you should do is rely on a phone call to any agency (such as ATF).  For starters, the answer you get has a 50:50 chance of being right.  Second, oral advice received on the telephone is only worth the paper it's written on.  When you get into trouble for violating a NYS law, the fact that you had a phone call with the ATF (or for that matter, a triple signed notarized letter with a gold seal from the agency's director) is not a defense you can raise at your trial.  The NYS criminal justice system is not subject to interpretation by the federal government.

If you want advice on NYS law, it's up to you to hire an attorney to have the research done yourself.  The best part is if you receive a written opinion from a lawyer in NY on a point of law and it turns out you were wrong, it can potentially be used as a defense insofar as it negates the criminal state of mind required to commit the crime (unlike an interpretation from ATF which has no weight in NYS courts, the opinion of a member of the bar that you reasonably rely on is accorded weight),

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