Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Documents just released years after a shooter murdered his mother, 20 students, 6 teachers and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School have been made available to Connecticut politicians and the general public in answer to a legal action brought by a persistent Hartford Courant. The documents had been carefully tucked away for five years and clearly point to the social and mental deficiencies of the shooter. All reports should have been released soon after the shooter’s suicide, because none of the information contained therein could have prejudiced any legal action. It is impossible to put a dead mass-shooter on trial for murder. In the absence of the necessary data unearthed above, a public trial of sorts, some of it sprinkled with absurd speculations, was conducted entirely in the mass media, and eventually one of the weapons used in the mass slaughter, an AR15 semi-automatic rifle , was pronounced guilty and banned in Connecticut.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of a passionate intensity”  – WB Yeats The Politico story came as a shock to no one: “ California Democrats decline to endorse Feinstein .” Connecticut has been blue roughly forever; ditto California, the political eagle’s nest of moderate Democrats turned progressive. Senator Dianne Feinstein, long a Democrat moderate, did not convert quickly enough. Then too, progressives, full of a passionate intensity, find protestations of progressivism dripping from the lips of moderate, long-serving Democrat political fixtures sadly wanting. If tomorrow Feinstein said she was backing a recent move to withdraw California from the union – a prospect eagerly awaited by national conservatives -- no one on the progressive side of the political barricades in California would believe her. Lions want red meat, not well cured moderate puff pastries.

Almost immediately after a gunman entered a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and mowed down the congregation with what the media refers to imprecisely as “an assault weapon” – what weapon used in the commission of a mass murder is not an assault weapon? -- Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut unscrolled their pitch: 1) assault weapons are murderous, 2) prayer is pointless and 3) send campaign cash our way. Prescinded from their analysis was the nub of the matter – the truth which, like the devil, lies in the details.

The following Media release was issued today by the Citizen's Defense League: Bridgeport, CT – Today, a widely-anticipated lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, challenging the constitutionality of the new firearms law that was passed hastily by the Connecticut legislature in response to the tragic shooting in Newtown by a disturbed individual. The lawsuit seeks immediate injunctive relief and a ruling declaring the new law unconstitutional under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It alleges that Connecticut’s new firearms law is not only unconstitutional but dangerous, since it makes both citizens and law enforcement less safe by depriving citizens of firearms that are in common use throughout the country. The very firearms and design features banned by the new law are commonly used in part because of safety, accuracy and ease-of-use features that make them effective in the hands of citizens who must defend themselves and their families against cr...