Connecticut’s Largest Paper Upset That Connecticut Gun Owners Are Ignoring Law

February 19, 2014 by Bob Livingston

As we told you Monday, Connecticut gun owners are ignoring that State’s unConstitutional gun law requiring the owners of “military-style” rifles to register their firearms with the State police and receive an “assault weapons” certificate in order to legally own the weapons.

The law called for the registration to be completed by Jan. 1. But as of last week, only about 50,000 applications for the certificate had been filed, meaning as many as 350,000 Connecticut gun owners have decided to become felons under State law rather than register their weapons.

This civil disobedience has not sat well with the State’s lawmakers or elite, though they’re not sure what to do about it. Now the State’s largest newspaper, The Hartford Courant, is pressing the Governor to enforce the law.

In an editorial last week, the paper called for the use of the background check database as a way to find weapons purchasers who had not registered their firearms.

Although willful noncompliance with the law is doubtless a major issue, it’s possible that many gun owners are unaware of their obligation to register military-style assault weapons and would do so if given another chance.

But the bottom line is that the state must try to enforce the law. Authorities should use the background check database as a way to find assault weapon purchasers who might not have registered those guns in compliance with the new law.

Using the background check database to go after weapons owners would be unlawful. But such is the nature of statists who believe the government can use, misuse or ignore laws on a whim if the cause is good for the state.

Gun owners and 2^nd Amendment preservationists have long said that background checks and registries are precursors to confiscation. Such claims have been met with protest and derision by the gun grabbers, hoplophobes and those who seek to erase the 2^nd Amendment from our consciousness.

But gun confiscation using registry databases is no fantasy. It’s already begun in New York based on the number of rounds a gun holds and on medical reports. Last year, a bill was introduced in the Washington State Legislature that would have called for home weapons inspections by the county sheriffs, and California allocated $24 million to aid the State’s Department of Justice in gun-confiscation efforts.

Back to the Connecticut issue. It’s doubtless that a PR campaign — as called for by the newspaper — to reinforce the State’s gun registry and threats of prosecution will cause some of the State’s recalcitrant gun owners to reconsider and register their firearms. It’s also doubtless that many gun owners will simply continue to refuse to comply.

The big question then becomes: What happens next? Will the State begin to forcefully confiscate weapons? And if so, will gun owners resist?

It seems the Courant wants to see this conflict come to a head. If that’s the case, as The Truth About Guns writes:

Is that a threat to end civil disobedience by force of arms from the oldest continuously-published newspaper in the United States, the The (sic) Constitution State’s largest dead tree daily rag? Yes. (Although you may not be surprised to hear that the the Times Mirror (the Los Angeles Times‘ parent company) bought the Courant in 1979.) And if the Courant is talking war you can bet Governor Malloy’s boys are doing the same.

The statists who enacted this law better let sleeping dogs lie. Or they will have to face the consequences, too. That’s not a threat. It’s a prediction.

If called on to enforce the law, Connecticut’s law enforcement apparatus had better be mindful of the 3 percent.

Original article can be viewed here

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