By Chris Powell
On the Friday before the state election, Governor Lamont and state Attorney General William Tong seized the last opportunity of their campaigns to show that most of Connecticut politics is empty posturing without relevance to daily life — indeed, to show that some of Connecticut politics is even a [ITALICS] denial [END ITALICS] of daily life.
Lamont and Tong held a press conference at the state Capitol to denounce a national gun rights group for asking a federal court to suspend enforcement of Connecticut’s law banning certain rifles, a law being challenged on constitutional and civil rights grounds. The governor and attorney general insisted that the law is saving lives — a claim without much evidence — but the attorney general went distressingly farther.
Tong declared: “Nothing is more unwelcome and offensive than radical extremists coming from outside Connecticut, using our courts to try to attack Connecticut’s gun laws, which we decided that we need here in Connecticut to keep our families safe. We reject these efforts by people from outside Connecticut trying to come in and tell us what to do, and the governor and I will push back very hard on it.”
Tong’s thought — darn those blankety-blank outside agitators — and his language were identical to those of the segregationists who disparaged the protests staged in the South for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Tong’s idea and language were just as mistaken.
For there are many adherents of gun rights who live in Connecticut and who support the litigation against the state’s ban on certain rifles. The lawsuit couldn’t have been filed without them. The Southern segregationists of old would smile at the attorney general’s implication — all the more remarkable coming from a lawyer — that people who question the constitutionality of state action have no business bringing suit about it in federal court.
The attorney general recently got a law passed to establish a special civil rights unit in his office. Now for a little chest thumping on camera he was condemning people for trying to vindicate civil rights in his own state.
But if it is evoked in a politically correct cause, even a fascist pose like the attorney general’s now can pass for liberalism in Connecticut.
While the governor and attorney general claimed that the law banning certain rifles is saving lives, handguns continued to blaze away around the state. Within days of the press conference three people were shot by handguns in two incidents in New Haven that happened within 40 minutes of each other. They survived. But there were fatal handgun shootings in Hartford and Norwich, and more non-fatal ones in Bridgeport, Waterbury, Newington, and East Hartford.
The “four more years of gun safety” promised by the governor’s campaign haven’t arrived yet. Neither have the last four years of gun safety.
Of course the two police officers who were ambushed and murdered last month in Bristol were killed by a drunken madman with a rifle, but this was an aberration in gun crime, and in an ambush the madman might have murdered the officers with handguns, which, as a gun nut, he also owned.
That is, the gun crime problem isn’t a problem of certain rifles. It isn’t even really a problem of guns, there already being so many in the public’s possession that they will never be taken away and always will be available to someone determined to break the law. The problem is [ITALICS] people, [END ITALICS] and law is little good where people are determined to break it — and yet in Connecticut government’s response to a problem is usually to enact more law pursuing the approaches already shown not to work.
For example, spending in the name of education is increased every year in Connecticut even as student performance keeps declining and becomes the rationale for still more spending. Since so many people draw their livelihoods from that spending, no other approach is possible politically.
Poverty programs long have failed to improve Connecticut’s cities, producing dependence instead of self-sufficiency, but that dependence requires ever more programs to sustain it and so no alternatives are possible politically.
The more laws and programs, the harder it becomes to change government’s course to make it work in the public interest — the less government becomes a means to an end and the more it becomes an end in itself.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 