Gun Control, The Malloyalist Molotov Cocktail, Detroit Or Bust

The premise of Connecticut’s new gun control legislation is that crimes committed illegally with guns may be controlled by such measures as requiring once licit gun owners to register their guns. That premise is doubtful, to say the least.

Connecticut’s new gun control legislation felonizes the ownership of a gun that has not been reported to the state police. According to recent stories, the state is awash in new felons, none of whom have committed violent crimes with their weapons. Among the new felons are some who have failed to register their guns from inadvertence, others who have failed to register for reasons of principle, and still others who are determined to treat the new law in the same way as those who drive cars with expired licenses. This last group is willing to spin the roulette wheel, knowing in advance that they are not likely to commit crimes and so come to the notice of an arresting authority.

The number of gun owners in Connecticut who have not registered their guns within the time allotted by the new bill is astonishing. State police, a Hartford paper reported, had received nearly 50,000 applications for assault weapons certificates by the end of 2013, a figure that represents as little as 15 percent of those who own guns classified as “assault weapons” under the new law. The “assault weapons” classification itself has been questioned by gun groups. If an “assault weapon” is any weapon used in an assault, the list of prohibited weapons in the new bill is much too short.

Frankie “The Razor” Resto, recently sentenced following a plea bargain, obtained the weapon he used in a deadly assault in Meriden from an illegal weapons black-market that will survive any law written by Connecticut’s General Assembly proscribing the use of specific guns, especially rifles. Laws proscribing the use rifles are not likely to put much of a dent in the commission of crimes. FBI statistics show that the number of murders committed with rifles in 2011 was 323, while handguns accounted for 12,664 homicides.

Mr. Resto came by his prison title “The Razor” because his assault weapon of choice, when he wished to shake down a drug dealer, was an assault razor. But “The Razor,” once released from prison, easily managed to acquire a gun obtained illegally, as well as hollow nosed bullets, also illegal, to murder Ibraham Ghazal, a store keeper in Median. Mr. Resto, a graduate of prison czar Mike Lawlor’s Orwellian titled Earned Risk Reduction Credits program, agreed to a plea bargain in which five more years might have been added to his sentence of fifty three years because he had used an illegally acquired assault weapon to murder Mr. Ghazal – but the weapons charge was not a part of Mr. Resto’s plea agreement. It is unclear why or at whose insistence the weapons charge was dropped from the final agreement. It is highly curious, however, that a state seemingly interested in protecting its citizens from law abiding gun owners who have no intention of committing violent crimes should have dropped from a plea agreement a weapons charge that could have added five years to the sentence of a violent murderer. A plea agreement that did not expunge the weapons charge might have convinced some recently felonized gun owners that the state of Connecticut truly was interested in prosecuting the illegal, violent and criminal use of guns.

Violent criminals such as Mr. Resto – who burned his mattress while in prison and gave other indications that he was an incorrigible gang-banger upon whom Mr. Lawlor’s ill-conceived get out of jail early program would have no effect at all – can acquire banned weapons as easily as they acquired Mr. Lawlor’s UNEARNED Risk Reduction Credits, which were distributed retroactively to thousands of prisoners. Mr. Lawlor’s program was not vetted by relevant legislative committees. Instead, the former co-chair of the Judiciary Committee attached his program to an omnibus implementer bill at the end of a legislative session. Attempts by Republicans to exempt violent criminals from the program have been rebuffed by Mr. Malloy, Mr. Lawlor and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, most of whom will be claiming implausibly during the upcoming elections that Republicans are waging a fictitious war on women. Mr. Lawlor’s program awards “Risk Reduction Credits” to violent criminals convicted of sexual assault in the first degree, assault on a pregnant woman, kidnapping in the first degree, and other violent crimes committed against women. For whom, it should be asked, do Mr. Lawlor’s credits reduce risks?

These are the festering lilies of the one-party state: A poorly constructed bill is smuggled through the General Assembly by an arrogant and unresponsive former co-chair of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee; Mr. Lawlor’s judiciary co-chair in the state senate, Andrew McDonald, is awarded a seat on Connecticut’s Supreme Court (Mr. Lawlor and Mr. McDonald, it may be recalled, were largely responsible for the passage of a bill abolishing Connecticut’s death penalty -- shortly after a mass murder in Cheshire and months before another mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School); productive Connecticut citizens are over taxed by a spendthrift Democratic dominated General Assembly after the first Democratic governor since William O’Neill declines to invite elected Republican leaders to a budget negotiation process conducted largely in secret by Mr. Malloy and tax hungry leaders of SEBAC, a politically connected union group; a criminal report that should have been made available in camera to legislators writing a bill on assault weapons is unaccountably delayed; Freedom of Information regulations are under unremitting attack. And what is done and left undone by Mr. Malloy’s administration, acting always in concert with other Malloyalists in the General Assembly, remains hidden behind an iron wall of secrecy and dissimulation.

A media alive to the baleful effects of the one-party state would allow none of this – ever, ever, ever. But Connecticut’s largely somnolent media awakens only when the Malloyalist Molotov cocktail penetrates their usually safe corner of the political barracks. And so Connecticut progresses ever forward, its progressive pennants flapping in the wind -- Detroit or Bust!

Gun Crime, Still Not Fixed

Will the gun restriction bill passed by the legislature have an appreciable impact on gun crime in Connecticut? The future will provide an answer to that question, but it does not seem likely.

The gun restriction bill is targeted at gun owners that even Michael Lawlor, Governor Dannel Malloy’s choice to reform penology in the state, would be forced to admit do not generally show up in crime statistics. How many NRA members are currently doing time in Connecticut prisons because they used their guns to hold up EZMarts – like Frankie Resto?

Released early from prison under the auspices of Mr. Lawlor’s Risk Reduction Earned Credits program, Frankie Resto, a little more than a year ago, easily acquired a gun and fatally shot a store owner in Meriden.

Unless you can separate Frankie “The Razor” Resto and guns you will not make a dent in in the use of weapons by criminals; incidentally, they’re called “criminals” because they commit crimes.

The distinction between law abiding gun owners and violent criminals seems to be lost on the Malloy administration, Mr. Lawlor and the Democratic dominated General Assembly. Mr. Resto was a gangbanger who never -- under any circumstances -- should have been let out early from prison. In fact, after he had engaged in drug activity and burned his mattress while in prison, additional years should have been ADDED to his sentence.

Recently, three young men shot and killed a jogger, Chris Lane, a promising athlete from Australia , because, the shooters said, they were bored and decided to kill someone.  But the person whose phone call to the police was instrumental in their arrest, James Johnson, insists that the crime was a gang initiation killing. In criminal infested urban ghettos, where fathers are as rare as jobs, random or gang related killings are not at all surprising.

Mr. Johnson told an Australian paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, that the shooters “don't have proper fathers in their lives. You can't be a friend to your son; you got to be the father… I feel very sorry for them, they have ruined their whole lives, but they did the crime, they have to do the time. Perhaps they can make a life inside, get God in their lives.”

In many urban environments, random killings by gang members are part of the day’s routine. One may confidently hazard a guess that none of the young men accused of shooting Mr. Lane were members of the NRA. Every prison administrator and guard who had come into contact with Mr. Resto knew he was a gang member with a violent record.

When Mr. Malloy, Mr. Lawlor and the General Assembly have finished passing bills restricting the use of guns by non-violent gun owners and facilitating the early release of violent convicted criminals, they might want to do something about urban gangs.  In large cities in Connecticut, guns don’t kill people – gangs do.  The gun restriction bill passed in Connecticut may or may not be useful, but the long arm of that bill will not inconvenience the criminal element in cities.

What could be done to accomplish this end? All the effective solutions are politically risky. It would help a great deal if politicians were interested in restoring the torn social fabric in urban areas.

We should not wait for universal agreement among sociologists before we accept as reasonable Mr. Johnson’s proposition that young boys go wrong when they are not guided by a father’s firm hand.  In fact, there are many sociological studies that point to a connection between fatherless families and urban crime; other studies demonstrate a positive connection between the presence of a father in an urban family and intelligence in male children.

Fatherless children in urban areas drift off into gangs, often a paternalistic substitute, commit crimes, go to prison, get out, commit more crimes, father a fatherless child, go back to prison – and the unbroken cycle repeats itself endlessly.  We have to wake up to this reality.  How many more young boys in cities have to be sacrificed to the urban Moloch before we take very hard, politically risky steps to ameliorate the problem?

Moloch was the pagan idol to which children were sacrificed by a passage through fire. We have to restore – especially in urban environments, where children are made to pass through the fire daily – the real presence of fathers in families. And moral suasion is not enough.  It is not enough for a paternalistic state to tell an absent father who effectively has been replaced by the solicitous state, that he must – really, he must! – accept the responsibilities of fatherhood, even from his jail cell.

Either we take the hard way or we accept Moloch’s terms:  A child, abandoned by its father, is born out of wedlock; the state agrees to finance the status quo; the child joins a gang, passes through the fire, commits a crime, goes to prison, is let out early because he has taken courses provided by Mr. Lawlor’s new program, fathers yet another out of wedlock child, commits another crime, is remanded to prison. And the prisoner’s children are remanded to Moloch.

Under these circumstances, every refusal of a choice is a choice.