Chris Powell: On gun control, considerTrump’s attempted ‘coup’ and Ukraine; vacuous school prayers

Colt’s Armory, in Hartford, in 1896. Connecticut has long been a major firearms maker.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Eighteen months later the political left is still stewing about and running a congressional investigation into what it calls a "coup attempt" and "insurrection" instigated by President Trump and supported by many Republicans to steal the 2020 presidential election under the pretext that it was stolen from Trump because of widespread vote fraud.

"Coup" or "insurrection" or not, Trump's attempt to interfere with the normal counting of the electoral votes in the Senate was reprehensible, even if four years earlier many leading Democrats had claimed, also without much evidence, that the presidential election had been stolen from them.

But amid the agitation about the recent mass shootings, the left has failed to learn a lesson of the "coup" or "insurrection." That is -- to borrow from the old cautionary slogan of supporters of the Second Amendment -- if guns had been outlawed on Jan. 6, 2021, only Trump would have had guns, at least if the military continued to take orders from him.

Trump isn't the first president to have provoked fears of a coup. As he resisted impeachment in 1974, President Richard Nixon so frightened his defense secretary, James Schlesinger, that Schlesinger issued instructions to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that no force-deployment order from the White House was to be obeyed if it did not come through his office. That is, Nixon's own defense secretary thought him capable of trying to overthrow the Constitution to remain in office.

But even as much of the political left remains obsessed with Trump's "coup," it also proposes to disarm the population by outlawing and confiscating semiautomatic rifles. Meanwhile the government of embattled Ukraine is distributing such rifles to civilians to combat the Russian invasion and coup attempt in the country's east.

Of course this irony does not diminish this country's catastrophic problem with gun violence. While mass shootings with scary-looking rifles like the recent ones in Buffalo and Uvalde work people up, on average more than 40 people are murdered with handguns in the country every day without generating much concern.

Handgun violence in Chicago has become overwhelming but it is a rare day when there aren't shootings in Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven -- all accepted as routine events of city life in Connecticut.

Tighter regulation of gun sales and possession -- comprehensive background checks, waiting periods, "red flag" procedures, increased screening for young people seeking guns, including a higher age of eligibility for purchases -- along with long sentences for repeat offenders, probably could reduce gun crime generally.

Soft targets such as schools can be protected better. Maybe someday government and society will be willing to examine even the epidemic of child neglect that produces so many disturbed teenagers and young men.

But a disarmed population will always be more susceptible to coups and totalitarianism. President Biden is so awful that Trump well may become president again, and there always could be another Nixon, a president corrupted by power into lawbreaking. The people getting hysterical about guns might do well to keep this in mind.

Former Connecticut U.S. Rep. Gary Franks notes that reducing gun violence requires healing "hearts, minds, and souls." But his prescription is silly: Bring prayer back to public schools, from which it supposedly was banished by the Supreme Court in 1962.

Actually the court found unconstitutional only government-sponsored prayer in public schools. Students always have been and remain free to pray in school without being disruptive. But it is fundamental to liberty that government cannot compel expression of religious or political belief.

This principle was affirmed by the court in 1943, in the middle of World War II, when the court exempted schoolchildren from being required to salute the flag. "Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest," Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas wrote.

This precious liberty is exactly what makes the country worth supporting and the flag worth saluting.

Besides, the prayers of old in public schools were usually so superficial and designed only for appearances as to be meaningless and even mocking of the very exercise.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Political sanctimony won't solve gun-violence challenge

An AR-15, which was easily bought by Nikolas Cruz at a gun store and then used to murder 17 people at a Florida school.

Estimates are that 300 million guns are in private possession in the United States, 55 million Americans own guns, and that at any particular moment about 20 percent of the population is suffering some form of mental illness.

So the remarkable thing may be not that the country has mass shootings every week but that there aren't several every hour and that anyone lives beyond age 40, especially as the political atmosphere has become stifling with sanctimony about guns.

The country sure does have a gun violence problem. But the rhetoric about it often lacks much relevance.

The bodies hadn't even been hauled away from the high school massacre in Florida last week before Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy was pacing the Senate floor denouncing Congress for having done nothing about guns. Gov. Dannel Malloy, whose administration gave early release to convict Frankie "The Razor" Resto, who quickly went on to murder a store owner in Meriden, angrily accused Republican congressmen of having blood on their hands. 

As is often the case, the problem with the quick denunciations arising from the Florida massacre is that none of the common prescriptions for diminishing gun violence would have made any difference.

More background checks? Desirable as they are, the perpetrator in Florida had no criminal record and his rifle was legally purchased at a gun shop. No "gun show sales loophole" was involved.

More mental-health appropriations? These would be helpful. But while many of the perpetrator's acquaintances regarded him as troubled and he had been expelled from high school because of misconduct, he rejected treatment.

Limit the capacity of gun magazines? This is trivial, since plenty of damage can be done whatever the magazine size and empty magazines are quickly replaced with loaded ones. 

Outlaw "assault weapons"? This usually means any rifle that just looks scary. But the only thing that matters about a gun is not its appearance but its mode of firing, and there are only three kinds of guns. 

There are fully automatic guns, semi-automatic guns and single-shot or double-shot guns The first kind reloads automatically and permits multiple rounds to be fired with a single squeeze of the trigger. The second kind also reloads automatically but requires individual trigger pulls for the discharge of each bullet. The third kind requires reloading for every one or two discharges.

Fully automatic guns are tightly regulated by the federal government and are not widely in public possession. Most modern guns are semi-automatic, as the Florida perpetrator's was. Outlawing them means outlawing most modern rifles and pistols -- that is, outlawing most of the guns held by the public -- and limiting public ownership to shotguns, bolt-loading guns, and derringers. 

If outlawing most guns is what the advocates of more restrictions want, they should be honest about it -- and they will need luck with confiscation. After all, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns -- along with President Trump, that paragon of mental stability who also controls the country’s nuclear arsenal.

So unless the country chooses gun confiscation, it may be stuck with the public identification and preventive detention of the mentally ill and more armed security for its many soft targets like schools, theaters, and nightclubs.

Where 20 percent of the population is armed and another 20 percent is psychotic, inevitably there will be some overlap, against which the usual political sanctimony will be no defense.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.,  and a frequent contributor.

 

Conn. gun crackdown seems to work

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

After a lunatic young gunman murdered 20 first graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, Nutmeg State legislators in  2013 broadened the definition of “assault rifle’’ and the sale of gun magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds. State law also requires a permit to buy any gun or ammunition. And Connecticut has a registry of weapon offenders and a universal background check system.

Ron Piniciaro, executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence, told WNPR that the state had 53 homicides with guns in 2016, way down from the 92 before the new law took effect.  But then, southern New England has long had among the lowest gun-death rates in America.

Interestingly, reports WNPR, gun sales are still rising in the state. But Mike Lawlor, Connecticut’s undersecretary for criminal-justice policy and planning, says the rigorous permitting process keeps down the violence.

There have been variants of the Connecticut legislation promoted in Congress but as long as the National Rifle Association, which acts as chief lobbyist for the gun-manufacturing industry, holds sway there, don’t expect anything. Polls suggest that most Americans want tougher gun laws, but that counts for little on Capitol Hill!

Gun-control advocates lack the lobbying and campaign-contribution money of the weapons industry and, whatever the opinion polls show, gun lovers vote more intensely than do gun-control folks. And the gun lobby and its servants in Congress and the White House are far more politically ruthless than are gun-control people. For that matter, on a range of issues from health care to taxes to the environment, the majority of the public seems to favor slightly left-of-center positions, if national opinion polls mean much. But they vote at considerably lower percentages than do people on the right. They get the government they deserve.

Don Pesci: Pointless rhetoric after Alexandria shootings

From the hand-written copy of the proposed Bill of Rights, 1789, cropped to just show the text that would later be edited and ratified as the Second Amendment.

It took Hartford Courant editorial writers 10 plump paragraphs to reach their predictable corporate conclusion: “… Somehow this country must protect the fundamental right to assemble in peace, whether to talk politics or play ball or sit in school.  The way to do that is to limit the weapons that shatter the peace, not to silence the debate.”

There is little doubt that weapons may be used to shatter peace. That is the operative principle of all terrorists and anarchists. The weapons, as we have seen in recent days, may be various: suicide vests, trucks and knives – all assault weapons, an assault weapon being any instrument of death uses in an assault on human life, including, the editors of The Courant may be surprised to learn, an abortionist’s scalpel.

The attempted murderer who took up arms against Republican members of Congress at an Alexandria, Va., ballpark was obviously no respecter of the First Amendment, which includes the provision affirming a right of assembly. The right of assembly, prosecutors will tell you, is subject to some restrictions. Terrorists have no right to assemble to destroy, say, the Twin Towers in New York City. Republican and Democratic congressmen do have a right to assemble to commit legislation or to play baseball with each other in a false show of patriotic unity.

The victims who assembled to play ball in Washington were a) unarmed, and b) enclosed within a fence that made them easy prey for the shooter, who was shot dead by  Capitol Police officers on assignment to protect only one of the congressmen in the ballpark. Had the congressman not been there, the police would have been absent, and the other Republican congressmen in the ballpark  and their aides doubtless would have been systematically slaughtered.

It was the presence of armed police on the scene, good guns in the hands of the good guys, that prevented a mass slaughter. No one – liberal, progressive or Trumpian – would argue that a) the police should not have been armed, b) there is no moral difference between the shooter and Capitol Police, or c) rights of assembly or rights of free speech should be curtailed because, in an age of terrorism, the exercise of such rights provides killing opportunities for criminals and potential criminals. Indeed, Courant editors argue that Second Amendment rights should be curtailed to ensure a robust expression of First Amendment rights; though, of course, exceptions should be made in the case of professional defenders of the peace. Thank God that armed officers were present at the ballpark!

Very well then. The question arises: Will gun control that falls short of the abolition of the Second Amendment and universal disarmament get the job done? Will even such an extreme measure get the job done?

And the answer, booming in everyone’s ears, is – no, it will not get the job done. “The job” is to leave non-violent gun owners unmolested while preventing criminal access to assault weapons, an assault weapon being any weapon used in an assault; think for a moment of the average kitchen or car garage as an assault weapon armory.

The latest two terrorist assaults in London involved mass murder by vans, readily available for rent everywhere gun laws have been promulgated. London is a gun-restricted town. So is Chicago, whose gun laws are more restrictive than Connecticut’s.

A couple of months ago, Connecticut was deemed the murder capital of New England, and Connecticut’s gun laws in the post-Sandy Hook period are among the most restrictive in the nation. We have in our state gun-control laws that do not prevent gun crimes committed by criminals or potential criminals. Hartford and other of Connecticut’s large cities are shooting galleries in which the shooters are armed with weapons easily obtained by criminals and gangbangers, all of whom have slipped the gun-control snares fashioned by easily conned politicians.

So, then, the kinds of gun restrictions being peddled by Connecticut’s two U.S. senators, Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, are at best half-measures that will not and cannot prevent gun violence practiced by the average terrorist, anarchist or homegrown professional criminal. The protections offered by Connecticut's congressmen, are violence-prophylactics with holes in them.

Only the abolition of the Second Amendment, the confiscation of all guns in the United States, and an inescapable death penalty attached to all crimes committed with weapons might – might -- reduce gun crimes in the United States. Nothing short of such extreme measures might get the job done.

However, a disarmed general population elsewhere in Europe, enjoying themselves in cafes and rock concerts, has not fared well against terrorists with bombs strapped to their chests or armed with knives and murderous vans. Disarmed congressmen corralled behind a fence have not fared well against an enraged Bernie Sanders supporter who had expressed his violent distaste of a Republican president and Congress.

Connecticut’s restrictive gun laws have not brought the peace of lawful assembly to poor victims in Hartford who have barricaded themselves in their houses against gang and gun violence. Only armed and violent gangbangers and criminals are free to roam streets unmolested in Hartford, the most dangerous city in Connecticut.

Such extreme measures as have been mentioned here are not on the tables of Blumenthal and Murphy – just safe, pointless, vote-getting measures that touch only the lives of lawful gun owners.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.