By Chris Powell
Connecticut doesn’t do “gun control” anymore. Elected officials have euphemized it into “gun safety,” but it’s the same old thing: laws that make it harder for law-abiding and responsible people to exercise their federal and state constitutional rights to own and carry guns.
Ironically, Connecticut’s Constitution is even more emphatic about gun rights than the U.S. Constitution is.
The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights famously declares in its Second Amendment: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” A U.S. Supreme Court decision has been required to make plain that this right belongs to individuals, regardless of whether they are formally members of a militia.
Connecticut’s Constitution requires no interpretation with Section 17 of Article 1, its Declaration of Rights: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”
More ironic still is that even as government in Connecticut discourages gun ownership by the law-abiding, it goes easy on lawbreakers, especially those using guns to commit crimes.
In May the state Office of Legislative Research reported that two-thirds of gun charges brought in Connecticut between 2013 and 2022 had been dropped, usually in plea bargaining for convictions on other charges. That is, the state’s criminal-justice system considers most gun crimes dispensable, much less serious than other crimes.
Meanwhile 43% of offenders released from prisons in Connecticut are convicted and imprisoned again within three years, and many serious crimes are committed by repeat offenders. Indeed, the biggest cliche in journalism in Connecticut is “long criminal record.” Most journalists keep the cliche handy without ever pondering what it means about criminal justice.
Two recent national opinion polls undertaken by respectable and even politically correct sources suggest that the public may be catching on faster than elected officials and journalists in Connecticut are.
A poll by NBC News found 52% of respondents saying they own a gun or someone in their household does, the highest degree of gun ownership found by the poll since it began asking the question in 1999.
A Harris poll found 60% of respondents saying having a gun is necessary to defend themselves against criminals, with 55% saying that rising crime is the fault of “woke” politicians — elected officials reluctant to enforce criminal law.
Being national, those polls may not fully reflect opinion in Connecticut. But it would be strange if opinion here was not moving in the direction indicated by the polls.
Even people in Connecticut who are inclined to believe the claims that crime is down in the state and that it’s good to be reducing the prison population may have had second thoughts when they heard about an especially atrocious crime in October, the murder of a visiting nurse at a “transitional” home for sex offenders in Windham’s Willimantic section.
News reports said the suspect in the nurse’s murder was on probation after serving a sentence for rape and assault, adding that soon after being released from prison in 2021 he was found to be mentally ill and drug-addicted. But still he was free, while the nurse coming to visit him was neither armed nor escorted by someone who was.
State legislators say that when the General Assembly reconvenes in February they will consider providing security for visiting nurses who deal with dangerous patients. But legislators have given no hint that they will investigate why a mentally ill and drug-addicted rapist was free in the first place, though if accountability was the objective, such investigation might be done easily enough by reviewing court records and questioning prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, and probation officers.
In their next session legislators almost surely will attempt more “gun safety” legislation, because that makes them look busy about crime when in fact they are irrelevant. For to pursue “gun safety” is really to give up on reducing crime and poverty and its pathologies and arresting the social disintegration that is making more people think they should have guns.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
-END-
Chris Powell column 