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!

Lawlor’s Stow-Away Bill

If Frankie “the Razor” Resto were an AR15 semi-automatic rifle and present laws banning him had been in effect on June 27, he would not have been permitted within spitting distance of Meridan when, newly released from prison, he entered an EZMart store and fatally shot its co-owner, Ibraham Ghazal, according to arrest records. But Mr. Resto was at that point only an ex-con who had been given get-out-of-jail-early credits under a problem plagued program that was the brainchild of Governor Dannel Malloy’s prison commisar, Mike Lawlor.

Mr. Resto's criminal resume was such that he should never have been given early release credits under any circumstances; he should never have been paroled, and he should have served his entire sentence behind bars. Following his release, Mr. Resto should have been monitored carefully by Mr. Lawlor’s somnolent watchdogs and rearrested if he so much as jaywalked.

But Mr. Resto never served his full sentence – because Mr. Lawlor is a penological utopianist whose views on prison reform bear the same relation to reality as does a fish to a bicycle. So far, Mr. Lawlor has been able to honey-tongue his way past two murders and more than 700 rearrests of prisoners given early release credits under his program.

But then, who’s counting? The answer to that question is: no one.

Michelle Cruz, Connecticut’s Victims Advocate, started to tote up the numbers, but her agitations on behalf of Mr. Ghazal’s still living family members so disturbed Mr. Lawlor and Mr. Malloy, who brooks no criticism that cannot be answered in one line quips on “Morning Joe,” that Ms. Cruz’s license to defend victims preyed upon by such as Mr. Resto was revoked. Her job was put on the block and, before you could say Cook County, Illinois is the most politically corrupt acreage in the nation, Ms. Cruz was replaced by a Chicago political operative who is certain to get along famously with Mr. Lawlor, Mr. Malloy and their prison reform measures.

Mr. Lawlor specializes in smuggling his problematic bills past the noses of his comrades on the judicial committee and foxing the foxes. He would make a super incorrigible prisoner, but perhaps not as accomplished as Mr. Resto, who managed while in prison to shake down inmates over drugs, to roughhouse with guards, to burn his mattress, perhaps in protest at having unjustly received 199 days off his sentence courtesy of Mr. Lawlor’s program, and to compile a disciplinary record that should be the envy of any member of the Latin King gang. Some prisoners do have a refined sense of justice, however incorrigible they may be. Incarceration, like the possibility of execution in the morning, clears the mind wonderfully – not that Mr. Resto needs to worry he will be executed for having murdered Mr. Ghazal. Following fierce urging from Mr. Lawlor when he was co-chair of the judiciary committee, the Democratic dominated General Assembly at long last abolished capital punishment in progressive Connecticut shortly after two paroled prisoners invaded a home in Cheshire and murdered three women, first having raped a mother and daughter, by setting their house on fire.

Mr. Lawlor, in a transparent attempt to smuggle his program past the noses of his more vigilant comrades in the legislature, initially packed his Risk Reduction Earned Creditsbill in an implementer suitcase; the implementer bill is last minute measure usually designed to implement budget provisions, and it has always been easy to hide a rat in such omnibus bills.

This time around, Mr. Lawlor has attached his so called“reform” legislation putatively correcting problems in his program to a larger bill banning so called “assault” weapons; this after ranking member of the judiciary committee Senator John Kissel, during a special hearing on the defects of Mr. Lawlor’s problem infested program, put Mr. Lawlor on notice that members of the committee wanted to address the defects of his program in a stand-alone bill so that legislators might cast an honest up or down vote on his readjusted bill.

Mr. Lawlor’s proposed “reform” considerably worsens his present blood stained program because it codifies its most glaring defect and invites the imprimatur of a distracted General Assembly . The problem with Lawlor’s law is that it bestows upon violent criminals the same get-out-of-jail-early credits properly given to inmates who have not been convicted and sentenced for such crimes as rape, kidnapping, arson, first-degree manslaughter, assault of a pregnant woman, first degree assault, second degree strangulation, first degree threatening, having sex with someone under the age of 13, assault of a blind or disabled person and animal cruelty.

The preponderance of testifiers at the hearing -- including Democratic state senator Danté Bartolomeo, who replaced perhaps the most ardent opponent of Mr. Lawlor’s program, Len Suzio, and who now represents stricken Meriden in the General Assembly – spoke in favor of a re-draft that would separate the categories of violent prisoners mentioned above from Mr. Lawlor’s early release credit program.

Mr. Suzio recently characterized Mr. Lawlor’s measure, stowed in the gun control bill affirmed by the Senate on April 4 and codifying the present arrangement suitable to Mr. Lawlor, as a “dangerous joke” and fraud upon the public. It is also a fraud upon Mr. Lawlor’s former colleagues who serve on the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee. It’s only a matter of time before yet another early-released criminal, his pockets bulging with good-time credits given to him by Mr. Lawlor, is prematurely set free to murder or rape some other Connecticut citizen who quite possibly had voted for Mr. Lawlor prior to his political assent as Mr. Malloy’s commissar of prisons.