Michael Ross Following a school shooting in Texas, eerily similar to the Sandy Hook slaughter of the innocents in Newtown, Connecticut, the state’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, have been out on the political stump pedaling their solutions to mass murders. Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, we find from a news report , “has been pushing for gun restrictions earlier this year, but the recent legislative session expired in early May without action.” The report quotes him: “… there are so many illegal guns on the street right now. I’d like to think we could have done a better job here in Connecticut and send a message far afield, especially when it comes to those ghost guns.” Was Lamont suggesting that the elimination of ghost guns would have prevented the most recent slaughter of the innocents in Texas? Was he suggesting that black-market gunrunners would cease and desist their already illegal activities should the national legislature pass gun laws favored by Blum
I find this in a letter to the editor written by Terrence Richardson of Glastonbury: “People generally don’t understand that the issue” –central to the Supreme Court draft decision on Roe v Wade – “isn’t about what we want. It’s about which authority is best suited to make the decisions: SCOTUS [the Supreme Court of the United States], 50 independent state legislatures, or one U.S. Congress.” That is a brief description of the Principle of Subsidiarity , an indispensible vein of liberty that runs through all governments everywhere, but most glowingly here in the United States. The animating idea of subsidiarity is that public functions should be exercised as close as possible to the citizen. The doctrine, originally a principle of social organization within the Catholic Church, holds “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a g