I’m baffled after reading an article in the New Haven Register on Tuesday about a man in Hamden who was released on a $2,500 bond. According to the article, the man got upset because he was sprayed with grass from a neighbors leaf blower, assaulted the neighbor with, I believe, a shovel, and then went home to retrieve a shotgun to, one would assume, shoot the neighbor.
The neighbor fled and called the police who arrested the man. But what baffles me is that this man was a convicted felon, assaulted a person with a weapon (shovel), possessed a gun illegally, threatened a person with the gun, and then is released with only a $2,500 bond? Am I missing something here? Because of the Newtown massacre, didn’t we just go through weeks of news on gun violence, do to various reasons like mental illness, illegal gun possession, dangerous looking guns, and a variety of other reasons? Didn’t we create a new law, along with the laws we already have, to prevent things like this? Didn’t we want to stop the wrong people from owning or possessing a gun, especially like a convicted felon?
The police throughout the state were all for a new gun law to create more restrictions and penalties. So the state hurries and passes another useless law, which of course, only restricts legal gun owners and obviously not felons. Why create new laws if you’re not going to enforce the ones you already have? Why release a felon, possessing a weapon illegally, using that illegally possessed weapon to threaten someone, performing an act of violence through assaulting the victim with a shovel, for a bond you would give a person driving without a license or less.
Where does the Hamden police get off doing this? Haven’t the Hamden police been reading the news lately or read the state and federal laws on a felon possessing or using a gun in a criminal act, like threatening? This proves what the gun owners have been saying all along, we don’t enforce the laws already on the books. Any felon possessing a gun or using a gun to threaten or attack someone should be held without bond or have a bond set so high that even OJ Simpson couldn’t afford it. The Hamden police should have set the bond at $250,000 or more at least, not $2,500. If this felon goes back out now and harms or kills that neighbor, will the Hamden police be libel?
James Pace Jr.
Bethany