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| Looney, Lamont, Duff and Ritter |
There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning – Abbie Hoffman
Governor Ned Lamont sat down with Hearst Media in mid-July
and bared his breast.
“Lamont said,” Hearst
reported, “that he is running not only to defend the state’s existing
[gun] laws, but to propose a new range of regulations on so-called ghost guns,
assault weapons and the carrying of firearms in public.”
The problem with laws is that any single law extended
infinitely in one direction sooner or later bumps up against another
countervailing law. The most efficient way to end gun violence, for instance, would
be to end legal gun possession, but the Second Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution makes that prospect forbiddingly unlikely.
Of course, it is always theoretically possible to repeal the
Second Amendment , regarded by the founders of the country as the palladium
of liberty. At the time the
Bill of Rights was adopted, the most highly regarded lawyer of the day, Judge
St. George Tucker, then Judge of the General Court of Virginia and later
appointed by President James Madison as U.S. District Judge for Virginia,
proclaimed the Second Amendment to be “the
palladium of liberty,” because
the Second Amendment secured a natural right of defense upon which all the
other imprescriptible rights in the Bill of Rights depend.
Stringent gun reforms, most dispassionate observers will
allow, have done little to reduce incidents of gun crimes in many of
Connecticut’s larger cities.
One begins to wonder if perhaps condign punishment, regarded
for centuries as a deterrent to violent crime, might be more efficacious than
unlikely gun reforms in deterring the use of guns in the commission of violent
crimes in urban areas by – surely this will not surprise – criminals with prior
records. In most large cities, both in Connecticut and across the nation,
justice agencies know who the criminals likely to commit serious crimes are.
During an “exclusive interview” with Lamont, the reporter
had the presence of mind to query the governor on a recent U.S. Supreme Court
decision that struck down New York’s pistol permit law. Lamont responded that “the ruling signaled a shift in the court’s
approach to the [Second] Amendment that could threaten Connecticut’s existing
gun regulations.” There has been no shift, none at all, in what one might call the
mind of the High Court on Second Amendment rights; indeed, the Supreme Court
has been remarkably consistent in its Second Amendment rulings.
Sounding a bit like
60’s radical Abby Hoffman, Lamont responded, “I mean, you don’t necessarily
want to pass a law that’s immediately taken to the courts. But maybe I don’t
care. Maybe I just want to give it a go and challenge the system.”
Politicians on the
campaign trail do tend to shift and dodge. But Lamont’s yea and nay on the same
point follow each other so rapidly that one begins to suspect the governor’s
views on an established Second Amendment right, unlike the views of Tucker and
the High Court, are infinitely flexible because they are not tempered by firm
principles. What is laid down as a sound principle in the first instance is
swiftly undone by an opposing, politically populist notion in the second
instant.
You cannot reduce
gun crimes by restricting Constitutional gun ownership rights. Criminals are
not scrupulous in observing laws passed by Connecticut’s General Assembly.
Their behavior might possibly be altered by laws preserving the public peace
that are ENFORCED, for laws without force are empty vessels. And we – criminals
included – know that the enforcement of laws cannot occur in the absence of a
legislative insistence that punishment DETERS criminal activity. No chronic bill
producers in Connecticut should any longer affect surprise that it is the
enforcement of laws, not their mere presence in the self-congratulatory bios of
ambitious politicians, that deters crime.
On his route from
60’s revolutionist to pro-police supporter, Lamont managed to quote former
President Ronald Reagan: “Crime is so politicized; I just thought having a
strong bipartisan vote of support for the cops, criminal justice, judicial, and
the wraparound services was worth it. Like Reagan said, I’ll come back and
fight another day for the other stuff.”
On the other hand: “If
your only answer to guns is to put steel walls and steel doors in front of your
libraries and churches and schools, you’ve lost the battle. Public safety has
got to be a core fundamental right; people are playing games with it now.”
The careful reader
will note the service done by the word “only” in that sentiment. One positive reaction to mass
slaughter in schools such as Sandy Hook has
been to provide well trained mass murder interrupters, not necessarily teachers,
to serve as breakwaters in schools and, in addition, to lock down schools
quickly without installing steel doors.
Reagan would have
approved of such measures, because he was a genuine peace and order chief executive,
unlike some governors who place their faith in the usual untried post-progressive
nostrums of the day, such as – bail bond elimination immediately after
criminals are arraigned in court, and bills that presumptively eliminate crimes
by eliminating laws punishing crimes. The easiest way to reduce crime
statistics in Connecticut is to redefine some crimes out of existence.
But the easiest way
to deter crime, especially for those who do not want to play “political games”
in order to garner votes, is to assign to crimes just punishments and then ENFORCE the punishments.
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