By Chris Powell
Was Governor Lamont serious the other day when he said, as he had said during his campaign for re-election, that he wants to repeal the part of the state’s gun law permitting people to keep the military-style rifles they owned before the state banned their possession and sale?
The governor, a Democrat, might not have much support for such an initiative in his own party in the General Assembly. New Haven Sen. Gary Winfield is skeptical. Betraying the assurances that were made to rifle owners to pass the original legislation would be a problem, Winfield told the Connecticut Mirror. While the senator is no partisan of gun rights, he agrees with gun rights advocates who note that gun crime almost always involves handguns and rarely involves military-style rifles or any rifles at all.
Rifles “grandfathered” by the law are registered with the state, making their use in crime even less likely. While the grandfathering doesn’t cover rifles that might be brought into the state by criminals, criminals wouldn’t be obeying any gun laws anyway and no Connecticut law is going to stop out-of-staters determined to commit crimes with such rifles here.
Then there would be the challenge of confiscating the rifles that have been grandfathered. The state police are already badly under strength, so would the governor send them knocking on the doors of the many thousands of registered rifle owners or going to court for search and seizure warrants and subpoenas?
Some rifle owners might grudgingly surrender their guns upon passage of such a law, but many also might hide them or move them out of state or claim to have done so, inviting state government to sue or prosecute them.
Some rifle owners might commence litigation themselves, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court has become more supportive of Second Amendment rights and the rifles at issue are widely owned nationally, strengthening a claim that the amendment protects their ownership, even in Connecticut.
The continuing obsession with military-style rifles on the political left serves as a distraction from state government’s ineffectiveness in the face of Connecticut’s worsening violent crime and social disintegration. At least as a matter of politics, doing something irrelevant may play better than doing nothing at all.
* * *
Journalism today increasingly euphemizes to propagandize under cover of news reporting. The latest example seems to be the term “gender-affirming care,” which has replaced “sex-change therapy.” The old term is traditional, literal, apolitical, and accurate. The new term is politically correct but deliberately inaccurate to mislead.
For “gender-affirming care” would not be undertaken if people were not dissatisfied with the gender they already have and were not seeking to displace something bothering them.
“Gender-affirming care” is being used to pretend that gender has no physical manifestation and is entirely a state of mind that can be changed at will. That’s not true. Gender has physical and biological manifestations, and “gender-affirming care,” just like sex-change therapy, may involve both surgery and drugs that can cause irreversible physical and mental changes that people sometimes come to regret.
Erasing this aspect of sex-change therapy from the public mind seems to be the propagandistic intent of the euphemism — to give the impression that nothing questionable is going on, that all is sweetness and light, just ordinary medical care.
But that’s not true either. Sex-change therapy for minors is fairly challenged on the old principle that minors are not qualified to give consent to irreversible things and that certain things with minors should wait for them to achieve their majority.
There [ITALICS] is [END ITALICS] a serious argument here. But as various totalitarians are said to have observed, “If you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it or about it.”
George Orwell concurred in his dystopian novel “1984,” wherein a functionary of the totalitarian state remarks about the government’s comprehensive censoring of the language:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
—–
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
-END-
Chris Powell column 