I feel that I need to offer a second opinion to the rants in your editorial regarding the gun rights rally from last Saturday and your callous referral to some of the comments from the speakers as making us less than “law abiding.” The comments from the speakers were in direct response to the scandalous way in which the governor and his ilk rammed this legislation down our throats.
Not a single public hearing and no time for the senators and representatives to fully comprehend 140-plus pages of laws that even the police cannot understand. And they will be expected to enforce them. All introduced on a Monday afternoon, vote taken on Wednesday and signed into law on Thursday. That was the most criminal use of legislative power I’ve seen in a long time. But wait – where have we seen this before? Oh, yeah, the Obamacare debacle. Remember ... thousands of pages, no time to read it, “let’s pass it and we’ll read it later?” Sounds like a chip off the old block. Do you call that law abiding? Who wouldn’t consider civil disobedience toward such a blatant abuse of power from those who are supposed to represent them? I have zero respect for this crowd of tyrants and their ways.
It’s borderline criminal that the contents of this bill did not get aired in public prior to the vote. All feedback provided prior to the drafting of the bill regarding keeping such weaponry out of the hands of criminals and the monsters who would perpetrate these crimes was ignored. Do you think these folks will be complying with the new laws when they obviously ignored those currently on the books?
Let me propose this. Since you feel so strongly about these new laws getting the guns off the street, why not send your editorial staff, reporters, production crew, etc. out into some of the more violent neighborhoods of Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, etc.? You could go door to door and help collect all of the illegal weapons. Then, the long suffering residents of these areas will thank you for making them feel safe again in their homes. Certainly, those who commit these violent crimes will heed the new laws and voluntarily hand over their weapons to help ensure public safety, right? Please!
What makes your editorial even more infuriating is that five pages back, the continuation headline for the Boston story shows in BOLD print “Boston: Neither suspect had a permit to carry guns.” This is what drives gun rights activists to speak out as we do. Your own newspaper acknowledges that the bad guys won’t be affected by these laws – they didn’t even obey the ones on the books before. So why penalize those of us who will never commit a crime with a weapon? There is no logic I can think of other than a preset agenda to disarm those of us who want to protect our families in the first few minutes of a crisis until the police can arrive. Why is that so hard for folks like you to understand? I am committed to doing what it takes to remove this atrocity from our books.
This is clearly a violation of our civil rights under the Second Amendment. So, where is the ACLU and other similar groups in all of this? Don’t they scramble all over themselves to protect these rights when a perceived violation of the First Amendment takes place? This is the civil rights issue of 2013. Shouldn’t we see Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton standing by our side to help us crush this blatant disregard for our freedoms? I’m not holding my breath.
Don Nidoh
Cheshire