Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Dannel Malloy, the Record Journal reports , is not anti-gun. He has proposed raising pistol permit fees by $230; presently, fees are hovering around $50. He is pro-fee.  “I’m not anti-gun,’ Malloy said. “I have lots of friends who are hunters and I know lots of people who have guns.” Following the slaughter of the innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Malloy succeeded in passing a bill through Connecticut’s General Assembly rather quickly. The National Rifle Association (NRA), the bete noir of Malloy and Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, protested as expected. Following passage of an “assault weapons” ban among the most restrictive in the nation, Malloy appeared on CNN’s show “State of the Union” and fragged both the gun industry , some of it still operating in Connecticut, and the NRA. “What this is about,” said Malloy, “is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible—even if they ar...

Following the successful passage of a bill in Connecticut restricting gun use, a political bar had been crossed. It is a considerable understatement to say that the political rhetoric wielded mostly by Democrats, without which the bill might not have passed, was overheated. To a man and woman, the chief actors – Governor Dannel Malloy and most Democratic leaders in the General Assembly – insisted time and again that their legislation would prevent such events as the mass slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “ One Connecticut rifle manufacturer is leaving the state because of its strict new gun restrictions,” Maureen Dowd wrote in a New York Times column, a provocation to which newly elected U.S. Senator Chris Murphy responded, “If we made our schools safer at the expense of a handful of jobs, I think that’s a trade-off we have to make.”