Why Connecticut will never get tough on gun crime

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s failure to prosecute many gun crimes aggressively isn’t as bad as it seems, prosecutors and a former state legislator told The Day of New London this month. They were responding to a General Assembly report that as many as two-thirds of the gun charges brought by police in Connecticut in recent years had been dropped.

So many gun charges are dropped because they are related to charges considered more serious, like robbery and assault, and, as in most criminal cases, prosecutors drop or reduce what are considered the less serious charges to get guilty pleas on what are considered the more serious charges.

That’s not negligence on the part of prosecutors. Plea bargaining, the comprehensive discounting of crime, is the custom in Connecticut and throughout the country. There are too many crimes and not enough police officers, prosecutors, public defenders, and judges to do a conscientious job with all of them. Priorities must be set and choices made or nothing would get done in court, and prosecutors have vast discretion.

But the politicians and others who clamor about gun crime and demand more “gun control” — that is, more restrictions on law-abiding gun owners while gun criminals often get off easy — fail to grasp the logic of their own position, which is that gun crimes are actually more serious than the crimes on which prosecutors try hardest to get convictions.

After all, what would happen if state law or just prosecutors considered a gun crime to be more serious than a crime of robbery or assault? What if gun crimes carried a mandatory sentence of 25 years or more of imprisonment without parole and prosecutors discounted the accompanying robbery or assault charges to gain conviction on the gun charges?

Of course in those circumstances people contemplating crimes with guns might be powerfully deterred, far more deterred than they now are by the laws against robbery and assault, where convictions seldom keep offenders locked up for long.

But Connecticut’s politically correct liberalism would never permit taking gun crime so seriously. 

In the first place, those who clamor against guns do not seek to end gun crime as much as to disarm society and nullify the Second Amendment without bothering to repeal it. Even as they recognize the risk of demon Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, they fail to recognize the risk to an unarmed citizenry — the risk that when guns are outlawed, only Trump will have guns.

Secondly, having given up on actually solving the country’s worsening problems of poverty and education and choosing instead just to keep throwing money at the government employees who pretend to solve them, those who clamor against guns understand that this failure ensures that crime will always be hugely disproportionate racially and that getting tough on gun crime will mean many more long imprisonments for members of minority groups. So instead of reducing gun crime, they prefer having thousands of repeat offenders running loose, as they do in Connecticut.

Yes, in plea-bargaining gun crimes away prosecutors are mainly following the priorities established by law. But as the persistence of gun crime demonstrates, those priorities are mistaken. The law should change them but unfortunately won’t.

DEMS EXCUSE THEIR OWN: Noting the criminal prosecutions underway against Trump, Day columnist David Collins writes, “It’s really hard to imagine any American would vote to elect a convicted felon.” Collins criticizes Connecticut Republicans who won’t repudiate the once and possibly future president.

Yet national polls suggest that most voters are ready to elect Trump, apparently because they find President Biden and his administration even worse.

Maybe this seeming indifference to misconduct shouldn’t be so surprising even in heavily Democratic Connecticut, where Bridgeport recently re-elected its felonious mayor, Joe Ganim, who, unlike Trump, was already long convicted on 16 federal felony charges of corruption in office and who nevertheless maintained the support of all the state’s leading Democrats.

What’s a few felonies between Democrats?

If Trump returns to the White House, it will be mainly the Democrats’ doing.           

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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