By Chris Powell
Most prominent Democrats in Connecticut hate the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and its right to bear arms. They blame the Second Amendment for gun crime and strive to impair gun rights in any way they can. They have yet to notice that Section 15 of the Declaration of Rights in Connecticut’s Constitution is even more emphatic about gun rights: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”
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The Democrats characterize the most commonly owned semi-automatic rifles as “military-style assault weapons,” and, with their longstanding control of the General Assembly and the governor’s office, have outlawed them, though these guns are seldom used in crime. Nearly all guns used in crime are handguns, and nearly all handguns are just as semi-automatic as “military-style assault weapons,” if not as scary-looking.
Nor have the Democrats paid much attention to the survey done two years ago by the state Office of Legislative Research. It found that two-thirds of the gun crime prosecutions brought in Connecticut from 2013 to 2022 had been dropped, most in plea bargains for convictions on other charges deemed more serious. Any elected official who really believed his rhetoric about the awfulness of guns would be working to change the law so that use of a gun in commission of a crime would be the most serious charge short of murder. But it hasn’t happened.
Meanwhile 40% of offenders released from prisons in Connecticut are convicted and imprisoned again within three years, and many serious crimes are committed by repeat offenders, many of whom are not caught. But Governor Lamont and Democratic legislators often boast about the decline in the state’s prison population.
Rather than get tough on gun crime, the Democratic majority in the General Assembly has just passed legislation that the governor expects to sign to try to put gun manufacturers, distributors, and retailers out of business by letting them be sued for failing to take “reasonable” precautions against selling guns to people who use the guns in crime or give them to others for use in crime.
Gun manufacturers and licensed retailers are highly regulated and are not the cause of wrongful gun possession. The problem is the country’s huge informal market in guns and the huge number of guns in private hands. This market is impossible to control short of aggressive prosecution and severe sentences for gun crime — exactly what Connecticut has refused to undertake lest the prison population be increased with a sharply disproportionate number of offenders from impoverished minority groups.
Instead of increasing prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonments, Connecticut’s new law will incentivize gun haters and opportunistic lawyers to contrive lawsuits against gun makers and retailers and win enough financial damages or settlements to bankrupt them or drive them out of state. This won’t reduce gun crime but it may make the gun haters feel better about themselves and their failure to reduce gun crime and the generational poverty that leads to it.
Connecticut’s U.S. senators, Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, are pursuing a similar agenda in Congress. They want to repeal the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, enacted in 2005, which exempts gun manufacturers from lawsuits brought by victims of gun violence. Repealing the law and unleashing more damage lawsuits is another way of putting gun makers out of business and impairing the right to bear arms.
An argument can be made for repealing the Second Amendment and Section 15 of the Connecticut Constitution’s Declaration of Rights. But Democrats are too dishonest to make it. The Democrats want to nullify the Second Amendment and the gun rights provision of Connecticut’s Constitution but they don’t dare pursue their objective plainly, since honesty would arouse much more opposition than their indirection and would call attention to state government’s refusal to prosecute most gun crimes.
Amid their dishonesty, the Democrats should remember that, at least for the next few years, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws — and Donald Trump — will have guns.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 