Gun control, voting rights bills are just empty poses

As street riots recently exploded around the state, shockingly beyond the ability or willingness of police to suppress them, the General Assembly began enacting Governor Lamont’s new gun control legislation, which is more likely to impede the law-abiding from protecting themselves than to impede rioters and other criminals.

Among its oblivious provisions, the legislation would prohibit the open carrying of guns, as if criminals don’t already conceal their weapons when they set out to do harm. The legislation also would require owners of “ghost guns” — homemade guns without identification numbers — to register them with the state police, as if the point of a “ghost gun” isn’t to avoid tracing. (The state police won’t have to add clerical staff to handle “ghost gun” registrations. It will be surprising if they get even one.)

The legislation will establish special gun crime dockets in courts in the violence-wracked cities, which sounds like a good idea but won’t necessarily mean any more actual resources for prosecuting gun crime charges, 80% of which, House Republican minority leader Vincent Candelora noted in debate, are routinely plea-bargained away, indicating state government’s lack of seriousness about gun crime. But at least the gun crime dockets may help journalists keep track of the plea bargaining.

People would be forbidden from buying more than three guns per month, as if three can’t do plenty of damage.

People convicted of domestic violence would be denied gun permits, as if lack of a permit will deter anyone determined to murder his former love. Domestic abusers can be deterred only by prompt prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment, but state government isn’t prepared to appropriate for that. Instead state government offers victims of domestic abuse only court protective orders. Many murdered women have discovered that such orders are no protection at all.

As for the street riots, the legislature seems about to create a committee to study the problem, as if the social disintegration manifesting itself everywhere doesn’t imply government’s rather comprehensive failure and society’s unwillingness to defend itself and enforce standards of behavior, and as if the offenders themselves haven’t noticed this, as elected officials boast about reducing the prison population while repeat offenders run rampant.

The unwillingness to enforce behavioral standards, especially with young people, may have something to do with Connecticut’s difficulty in recruiting and keeping police officers and teachers. Teachers and police get the closest look at social disintegration. Connecticut’s elected officials don’t dare to examine it, much less confront it.

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While state legislators were evading the sensational failure of law enforcement amid the street riots, just as they long have been evading the collapse of public education, they did produce a solution in search of a problem -- a grand new voting rights law, pompously named for the late Georgia civil rights leader and U.S. representative, John R. Lewis.

The legislation would require municipalities with a record of discrimination against voters on racial or other grounds to get permission from the secretary of the state or a court before changing their election policies.

But no such discrimination in Connecticut’s elections was identified, and if any ever was, anyone aggrieved would be able, quite without the legislation, to demand and obtain redress from the secretary or a court anyway. The legislation will accomplish nothing except make its supporters feel righteous.

Connecticut does have occasional election problems, but mainly in its cities, whose populations are largely from racial minorities that are amply represented in city government, and these problems — incompetent administration — abuse everyone, regardless of race, as by making voters wait too long in line.

The practical discrimination faced by racial minorities in Connecticut has nothing to do with elections and little to do with race itself. It is indirect, mainly a matter of housing accessibility and poverty. The money of members of racial minorities is as green as anyone else’s and if they have enough they can live wherever they want, since money talks. But amid the failure of welfare policy and the success of exclusive zoning, poverty still walks.

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