By Chris Powell
With the enthusiastic assistance of news organizations, same-sex marriage was euphemized as “marriage equality.” Now sex-change therapy is being euphemized as “gender-affirming care.” And at the National Safer Communities Summit last Friday at the University of Hartford, at which President Biden spoke, gun control was euphemized as “gun safety,” as if the scores of shootings in the country every day are mere accidents and not crimes.
Supporters of the right to bear arms — a right even more firmly established in Connecticut’s Constitution than the national Constitution — were disparaged as “the gun lobby,” though they have no personal financial interest in the controversy, nor any financial connection to gun manufacturers. Disparaging them as “the gun lobby” is no fairer than to disparage the American Civil Liberties Union as the pornography lobby or the Nazi lobby.
The worst demagogue at the conference, perhaps not surprisingly, was the U.S. education secretary, Meriden’s Miguel Cardona, whose tenure has been most notable for his pandering to the teacher unions. “Please don’t get me started on the politicians pushing us to arm teachers,” Cardona said. “These are the same politicians who don’t trust teachers to choose the right books for our classrooms.”
The prospect of millions of armed teacher union members is frightening, but who is advocating putting guns in the hands of any untrained personnel in schools, and why should the textbook and library book judgments of teachers and school administrators be beyond question?
*
With the exception of requiring background checks for anyone purchasing or receiving a firearm, all the “gun safety” measures enacted so far or advocated around the country will have only a marginal effect on gun violence. That includes outlawing “assault weapons,” long-barreled guns whose basic mechanisms are no different than those of most pistols. Crimes with pistols vastly outnumber those with “assault weapons.”
“Gun safety” advocates know this. Their objective is to make gun possession more difficult for the law-abiding, since they understand that no gun law will much impede anyone who has resolved to use a gun to commit a crime. “Gun safety” advocates figure that when gun possession becomes difficult enough for the law-abiding, gun confiscation will become easier politically.
But when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns — among them, perhaps, Donald Trump, once again commanding the armed forces despite having already orchestrated a coup attempt at the end of his first term.
*
Circumstances in the United States sharply limit gun policies that might be practical and effective. For there is no starting from scratch. It is estimated that 40% of U.S. households are armed and that there are 120 guns in civilian possession for every 100 people. Many states are as protective of gun rights as Connecticut seems indifferent to them.
Deepening the support for gun rights is the country’s worsening social disintegration, especially in the cities, all governed, so to speak, by the political party pressing for “gun safety.” But social disintegration is everywhere. A few weeks ago Connecticut’s state police admitted that they were not sufficiently staffed to put down a riot in suburban Tolland. Apparently tear gas didn’t occur to them.
The big cause of gun violence is government’s long failure to elevate the poor, who now form an uneducated, unskilled, impoverished, and increasingly alienated underclass that grows despite numerous government programs claiming to alleviate poverty, programs seldom audited for results.
But in February Connecticut got a hint of what a little auditing of gun crime might produce. City mayors and police chiefs gathered at the state Capitol to report that most gun criminals in Connecticut are repeat offenders who somehow have not ever been put away for good.
That is, Connecticut law is not much of a deterrent to gun crime. So to achieve “gun safety” the state might do best simply to impose a sentence of life without parole for any crime committed with a gun or for any second or third felony conviction and to appropriate for the necessary investigation, prosecution, courts, and prisons.
——
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
-END-
Chris Powell column 