While Gov. Andrew Cuomo expressed outrage about the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton this weekend on a media tour Aug. 5, New York still has not built a database for ammunition sales, mandated by the 2013 SAFE Act. "This insanity must stop and it must stop now," Cuomo said in a statement after the mass shootings that killed over 30 this past weekend. "Those who are unwilling to do anything about it are complicit. I am sick of the excuses. I don't want to hear 'we can't' — because we know we can, and you just 'don't.'" Last year the governor said that he wasn’t aware of the status of the database for ammunition sales. And a Cuomo spokesperson said last year, “The State Police and Office of Information Technology Services have reviewed a number of technological solutions to implement the first-in-the-nation ammunition database, but thus far have been unable to address the myriad of legal and operational implementation obstacles.” State officials, apparently, still are having problems as the database of ammunition sales does not appear any closer to reality today. California, by comparison, completed its version of an ammunition database in only two and a half years. Beau Duffy, a spokesperson for the agency in charge of implementing the database, the New York State Police, told the Albany Times Union Aug. 5 that, "That work will continue until the database is realized.... Connecting dealers with a state system is a significant hurdle, one that did not exist in California, since the infrastructure linking firearms dealers directly to the state was already in place."

At any point on @NYGovCuomo's media tour, has anyone asked him why the state's ammo sales database remains unbuilt six and a half years after the SAFE Act passed?

— Casey Seiler (@CaseySeiler) August 5, 2019