On December 14 of this year, a month after Connecticut’s
general elections, people in the state will be memorializing the second year of
the Sandy Hook slaughter. On that occasion in 2012, Adam Lanza carried with him
to Sandy Hook Elementary school an
arsenal of weapons: an Izhmash Saiga 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun, a
Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle, a Glock 20 10mm
semiautomatic handgun and a Sig Sauer P226 9mm semiautomatic handgun. He had taken with him to the school two 12-gauge shotgun magazines, ten 30-round .223 magazines, six 30-round 9mm magazines and six 30-round 10mm magazines. All the weapons and magazines had been lawfully purchased.
Leaving
in the car the shotgun he had illegally appropriated from his mother, whom he
had just murdered with a Savage Mark II bolt-action .22-caliber rifle, Mr.
Lanza shot his way into the school and methodically murdered 26 people with the
Bushmaster rifle. Having killed 20 young children and 6 staff members of the
school, he then committed suicide with a pistol he had appropriated illegally from
his mother.
In response to the mass murder, the General Assembly, at the
urging of Governor Dannel Malloy, swiftly
passed Bill 1160, requiring lawful gun owners to register weapons, most
of them long rifles that appeared on a list of proscribed guns, among them the Bushmaster
model used by Mr. Lanza, at the time the most popular and fastest selling
sporting weapon in the United States.
Bill 1160 was not subject to the usual vetting process:
There was no hearing on the final bill, which swept through the General
Assembly on a wave of repulsion occasioned by the massacre. Gun
manufacturers in Connecticut were not consulted and played no part in offering
recommendations. Following passage of the rushed bill, the mild protests of
Connecticut gun manufacturers were met by the governor with open derision. At
one point after the bill had passed, the governor said of gun manufactures,
“What this is about is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to
as many people as possible -- even if they are deranged, even if they are
mentally ill, even if they have a criminal background. They don’t care. They want
to sell guns.”
Some Connecticut gun manufacturers, sensing their businesses
would be irreparably damaged in what appeared to them to be a prospective
election campaign featuring gun makers outfitted with cloven hooves and tails,
responded to the governor’s unbridled demagoguery by moving out of state.
Others predicted that Connecticut, still called “The Provision State”, would
soon become, under the hammer blows of gun-restricting legislators and a
campaign savvy governor, a
gun manufacturing museum.
The overriding public safety questions – under unremitting
threat by the usual disturbers of the peace, many of whom have prison records
and who easily skirt any of the provisions of Bill 1160 – should
play a significant part in the upcoming general election. It seems necessary
and fitting to raise during the upcoming elections the all-important question:
What has Mr. Malloy and the Democratic dominated General Assembly done – or,
perhaps more importantly, failed to do – to insure the public’s safety from
known criminal predators with prison records?
It is a given that criminals -- obviously not
self-reporting, law abiding gun owners -- may easily avoid the obstacles throw
up by Bill 1160 by obtaining proscribed weapons readily available on the black
market. It is also a given that pistols rather than long guns, most of which
are not outlawed by Bill 1160, are the weapons of choice among known criminals.
Convicted felon and violent offender Frankie “The Razor” Resto had no
difficulty in acquiring the weapon he used to murder Abraham Ghazal, the
co-owner of an EZMart store in Meriden, soon after Mr. Resto had been released
from prison. Mr. Resto was a beneficiary of Under Secretary for Criminal
Justice Policy and Planning Mike Lawlor’s deeply flawed Earned Risk Reduction
Credits program.
For more than a year after Mr. Lawlor’s program was smuggled
past the noses of watchful legislators in an end of session omnibus bill,
conscientious, public safety minded legislators had been pressing Mr. Lawlor to
exclude from his benefices violent criminals such as rapists -- to no avail. The
Lawlor program was launched to reduce recidivism rates, but getting from Mr.
Lawlor reliable recidivism data proved nearly impossible. Under Mr. Malloy’s
dispensation, the state is fast becoming a data closed-shop.
If women in Connecticut – upon whom Republicans are supposed
to have made war – feel comfortable with a regime that has granted
get out of jail early credits retroactively to upwards of 7,589 inmates,
they should have a conversation with women who have been the
victims of Mr. Lawlor’s therapeutic penology. People in
Greenwich need not worry that violent Cons who have taken Mr. Lawlor’s
therapeutic courses will be dumped on their doorsteps, but African American
single mothers in crime infested urban areas may have cause to wonder whether
their children will be safe from violent criminals awarded get out of jail
early credits by Mr. Lawlor, an ex-prosecutor and former co-chairman of
the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee whose personal life style
renders him safe from attack by, among others: convicted rapists, kidnappers,
arsonists, criminals who have assaulted pregnant woman and blind or disabled
persons, criminals imprisoned for first degree assault, second degree
strangulation, first degree threatening and having sex with boys or girls under
the age of 13.
If the state of Connecticut were seriously concerned with
preventing gun crimes committed by known criminals, Mr. Lawlor and Mr. Malloy
long ago would have exempted from the Orwellian titled “Risk Reduction Earned Credit” program all inmates who had illegally used a weapon in the commission
of a crime. At a bare minimum, Mr. Lawlor’s program should be
changed to exclude the above violent felons. And if Mr. Lawlor does not submit
his deeply flawed program to correction, Mr. Malloy
should fire him.
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