You want confusing?
In NY, a rifle is legally NOT a firearm.
That's because they have the Sullivan Act, which was designed to prevent all those awful minorities from getting their hands on nasty little handguns, which are bad. The Sullivan Act requires each applicant for a handgun permit to appear before a judge. This is so that even if the applicant somehow managed to bribe or con the local police into issuing the permit, the judge would make sure that black heroin addicts, Irish drunks, Italian gangsters, and Jewish diamond merchants would not get those horrible pistoles. If you want to study the codification of bigotry in The United States, start with the Sullivan Act and its supporters. They are just as bad now as they were when the thing was passed almost 100 years ago.